The Work

It's easy to love yourself on the bright days.  When you smell nice, look pretty and get out of bed before you hit the snooze alarm for the second time.  When you have the time to sit and meditate before sitting in morning traffic and not losing your cool.  When you carry that calm air into the workplace and field e-mails and phone calls while sipping your coffee and thinking about what to go over with your clients.  When you're smart and organized and on top of shit.  Those are the days when you convince yourself of your growing status as a genuinely wonderful person.

But these are not those days.  These are the days when your monsters rear their heads like unbeatable hydra and that voice in your head is so loud you have a hard time hearing the person talking.  The days when those old bad habits you thought you'd learned from and trained yourself out of years ago because they make absolutely no sense to repeat bash your skull against the proverbial rocks and hard places of your own creation.  The days when you're very much the opposite of intelligent, very much the opposite of calm, very much the opposite of the things you convince yourself you are on the good days.  And in these dark times you do what we all do: you make it worse by using soothing but ultimately destructive techniques to take the edge off (insert drug of choice here).

But what they say is that these are the days where the opportunity to love yourself is greatest.  Where the lessons you learn are strongest.  When the ability to amaze yourself is at its max.  Challenge is a nicer word for problem, right?  But maybe it's true- maybe this really is the proving ground.

To be all of those horrible things you wish nothing more than to not be and love yourself anyway.  Smelly and defeated and useless and weak and still perfectly lovable.  Repeating old mistakes, doing all the wrong things and still worthy of appreciation.  Ugly and impatient and full of so much rage your rational mind can't even make sense of it and still a beautiful, shining human life.  Still you, still whole, still radiant.  That's the fucking work.