Caution: Naughty language ahead!

I love fiercely.

I love myself fiercely.

Lately, it’s felt like I’ve got a new crush, and that new crush is me.

I’m like, “Woah, hello hot stuff, where have you been all my life?”, when I look in the mirror.

“You’re so beautiful, so talented, amazing, incredible, and capable, and I feel honoured to be a part of you and to witness your journey. You’re gonna rock it, and you’re rocking it already, you bad-ass motherfucker, you.”

During almost every talking-to-myself-in-the-mirror session, I end up in tears. Tears of love, hope, relief, forgiveness. A sense I’m coming home.

I’m falling in love with myself.

I’ve noticed a part of myself—in response to this beautiful, loving, empowering, and sometimes hilarious positive self-talk that’s flooding in at the moment—that’s like, “Okay…alright, alright, I get it—you love me, you think I’m amazing, you think I great, you are honoured to be with me on my journey, you’re proud of me, you think I’m rad, you think I’m fucking cool, you think I’m amazing, please just quieten down a little, I’m trying to sleep.”

But then I think, fuck it.

No way man.

I’m gonna let this voice of praise bellow. I’m gonna let myself feel and hear all these things—all this love and all this warmth.

I feel things intensely and that’s okay.

Sometimes (often) it’s exhausting but I realise it’s who I am: I’m someone who feels things intensely.

I’ve tried for a while to try to change this—to try and wear my feelings in a different way. To soften and breathe into the feelings to try to make them dissipate and/or go away, or to just try and get the parts of me feeling these feelings, to chill the fuck out a little.

But I realise that doesn’t work. It only creates inner conflict, which then amplifies the shitty and hard feelings that I feel intensely, too. Self-acceptance takes a dive out the window, and I’m left feeling isolated from myself, and lost.

Naked in a land of self-abandonment.

Allowing my feelings—whatever they are, and in all their intensity—to be here, with my breath rather than being shoved away by my breath, amplifies the love I have for myself. This lush and long-overdue love. I’m accepting myself rather than trying to change myself—something I never thought I’d write, and something that as I do write, I feel a little sick with nerves and potential embarrassment doing so (as though people reading this will be like, “Erm, she’s saying she’s brilliant and beautiful and wonderful! Has she looked in the mirror?!”) but it’s also something that I’m so fucking glad to see is truly coming, and something that’s partly here already.

Watching this love begin to flood in by the bucket load, feels like I’m winning the internal self-love lottery and I need to tell everyone and anyone who’s listening, and make them listen if they’re not. It needs to be headline news, because it is in my world.

Considering my journey until now, it definitely isn’t something I need to soften, quieten, or try to make dissipate.

This love is something I can let roar—inside and outside of me, spoken aloud or spoken to myself—because I deserve to love myself fiercely and I deserve to love the world and those in it, fiercely, too. Even if it is a little exhausting, it’s a healthy kind of exhaustion.

This love feels so physical (as do all of my feelings)—I feel it somatically.

These loving, mothering, full-of-warmth and admiration feelings often feel as though they’re going to bowl me over and or as though I’m going to explode with this new found love and respect for myself.

I can’t get enough of myself. When I’m giving myself a cuddle, I can’t cuddle myself tight enough.

Don’t get me wrong, my critic is still holding a megaphone and throwing ten-tonnes of shit around at the moment, too, I’m just beginning to truly embrace this love that’s here for myself fiercely, alongside it. the love can be here with the shit, just like my pain can be here with my beauty. The more the love is here, the more I feel able to navigate my way through the sticky path of the harder feelings, the pain, the anguish, because I know a part of myself really knows that I fucking shine.

My natural reaction is that I need to do something with this love, my new crush on me—tell myself something, tell someone about it (my new crush), hug myself, and do something for myself to show myself that I’m listening and that I love myself—but perhaps sometimes I don’t need to do anything.

Perhaps I can just breathe and let it be—let the love be fierce and let it be for me.

Perhaps just being with myself, in the love-floods, is the biggest gift of all.

A gift I deserve to receive, over and over again.

Love elephant and want to go steady?

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Editor: Rachel Nussbaum

Photo: Devendra Hijam; Thea Bea