Long Lessons in Self-Love
By: Christie Alex Costello
Tags: Relationships, Body Positive, Body Image, Self Love, Love

The work that comes with self-love is the hard work we always find a way to distract ourselves from.

“Start the Botox now to prevent the look (of aging) later,” she said.

A twenty-something in a hair salon on my thirty-first birthday. I shook my head; I will love myself at every age, I thought.

As a woman, I know that my entire Millennial childhood was conditioned around the idea of being like Barbie. With perfect hair, impossible measurements, great teeth, zero wrinkles, a pleasant smile, plenty of cool clothing, and the ideal Ken doll by her side. My thirty-something female friends know — the bar was not set low in the 90's by any means in American society.

Now, as I sit in a southern city filled with beautiful women; I find it challenging to watch my peers struggle to play the game of self-worth.

Ultimately, I stopped trying to look like Barbie around the age of twenty-four and never looked back. I hope that someday I have smiled so hard, for so long that my face begins to bend in the spaces that have been filled with joy.

We do not need our physical self to be loud in order to feel seen.

I’ve never been keen on make-up nor have I loved to do my hair, so maybe I am at an advantage to those that enjoy the sport of “getting ready” but I am not a contender on that field. Trying to mask what is not perfection only increases the tension within our hearts. The loud eye make-up and big hair don’t make us more visible to the people we are met to know; the loud effort will attract fleeting connections. So I ask, Why do you avoid the complicated process of finding self-love that is built in the process of taking off the mask?

If you don’t know…well, let’s be honest, you do. It begins with sitting in our reflections and doing nothing to change it. Acceptance. Acceptance is really hard because instead of forcing our bodies to stay tight and wrinkle-free, it’s about receiving years of change that the body goes through with a deep level of appreciation and understanding.

I know beauty can feel like a competition, but it’s not.

No amount of lip injections will make a mouth speak more beautiful words. No shots will make the joy leave your eyes without lines. No diet will make you feel more beautiful in that baggy sleep-shirt. There are no shortcuts and you are your only competition. To feel the appreciation of rest, we must first know real exhaustion; when we give ourselves permission to feel both, we stop competing with external factors. The feeling of competing to become more beauty is fleeting, the moment it comes it also goes — beauty passes through us like sand to sea.

Self-love takes longer than you think.

I went to war with my body at the age of twenty-five. Newly single, I was alone and trying to make sense of so many lessons that hung around my shoulders all at once. I stopped eating; I restricted myself to no-end. I slept, I exercised, I ate, I worked, I slept again. I lost myself in 2011 to the battle of perfection. I thought it would take months to rebalance and rebuild my confidence, but the journey back to my healthy weight and joyful took the course of two years. Self-love takes longer than you think, but it will come, not suddenly but slowly over time.

It is easy to look toward external beauty and media for guidance.

How can we help it when we grew up reading crap magazines or terrible reality shows? We don’t know any better until we realize all the weight we have internalized. We have to erase the models that were built in our childhood, and that is not a simple feat. No boob job. No tan lines. No lip injections. No botox. No extreme fasting or juicing will cure what only self-love is meant to do — force us to accept who we are, as we are.