Learning to Love Myself

Recently I feel I rounded a corner in my life.

At last, I’ve been learning to love myself. Since I was about 10, when someone’s asked me how I’m doing, I felt obliged to lie politely. I’d say, “O-kay.” With the end of this year’s Winter Depression, I feel like I shed something. When people ask me how I’m doing now, I feel compelled to be honest, and honestly… I’m really well.

Not much has actually changed, though.

I do have ongoing work with an awesome client, doing work I can do. Which is awesome. While it is different from nine of the last 10 years, it’s not different from last year. Last year was pretty much the same as this year, except my perspective has changed.

I feel less like I’ve changed my point of view, more like I spun a little bit on the center of my dial.

It feels so good, learning to love myself.

Of course it does; I’m loving and being loved in the same moment. And this must be finding its way into my art.

The evidence of it is already deep in my poems—my words always presage other changes in my life—and delicate young photography is starting to receive some of that… special attention.

I feel it here not in the work, exactly, but in my approach to the work. When my memory card fails, and I lose the last hour’s work, I don’t tantrum inside. I collect myself. I breathe out my anger, angrily. I ask, calmly, if I want to go home, or re-shoot. That day, I re-shot. Another day, I may go home.

What a revelation, that what I used to do—judge myself for deciding one way at all, which for so long was the only option—isn’t even an option any more. Actually, revelation’s not it. It’s a relief.