Falling in Love With Yourselves
Foreword: I’m delighted to welcome Aces Gayng as a guest blogger. Aces Gayng (sometimes known as JJ) has been a medical/surgical nurse for more than eight years. They are an Andean shaman, energy healer, and light worker; for more than nineteen years, they have been a writer and poet and are an active member of Dissociative Writers (and the facilitator of DW Social Hangout). If that weren’t enough, Aces Gayng is an artist, cosplayer, clown, and character actor/performer! Aces Gayng’s blog post was begun in a writers workshop and, when I heard it, I knew it had to find a home on my blog. ~ Lyn
Guest Blog by Aces Gayng
I have realized that falling in love with myselves doesn’t just mean, “I don’t hate myself.” That part felt like the easiest part, once we were through the thick dark tunnel of all the bad stuff. Once we were on our own, it felt like enough to say, “I guess I’m okay. I guess I’m not the worst person ever.”
Loving Yourself is So Much More.
The truth is that loving yourself is so much more. And these things are underrated, things like learning to take care of yourself, to listen to yourself. To be honest when you hear yourself. To be honest to others. To set boundaries and learn how to say no. To learn when to say no.
Learning to actually like myselves. To be nice to ourselves. Learning to treat ourselves like friends or family or lovers. Learning to fall in love with ourselves. And that’s the thing I think we don’t do enough: romanticize it. We should be taking ourselves on dates and sharing good things with ourselves and treating ourselves like the most important person or people in our life. We really fucking should. I think love is something that can be taught, and we can teach it to ourselves. We teach ourselves how we want to be loved, too.
Love Is …
Love is wearing soft or pretty clothing because we want to. Love is wearing short shorts and a tank top that we feel comfortable in, but our mother would have shamed us for. Love is making a nice cup of coffee in the morning and making sure we eat enough vegetables. Love is selves-reflection. Love is learning what we need and then making sure that we actually get it. Love is giving ourselves space to do that learning and then to figure out how we can actually follow through and apply it.
Love is going to bed on time, even though we don’t want to. Love is making ourselves speak the unspeakable in therapy, even though it’s painful or terrifying. Love is taking the time to ground, to breathe, to play patty-cake with our therapist or throw pillows and yell and be angry. Love is learning to cry, to let go of the things that we have kept wrapped up tightly in the corners of our mind. Love is opening boxes with horrors inside and gently unpacking them.
And love is doing a lot of things that feel uncomfortable, because we spent our whole life being taught that our needs don’t matter. Love is unlearning all of these ideas and beliefs that have hindered us from receiving what we deserve.
It’s a Choice.
And it starts in your heart. It’s a choice, always. I have to choose to make sure that we do these things, even when they’re difficult and foreign and new and scary. It is a choice to fall in love with ourselves. It is a choice to get to know the people who live inside my head and my body, people that prior to therapy, I saw little to no evidence of their existence. That’s the thing about DID: the person who sees the least of it is the person who has it. So learning about more than fifty people or alters who are sharing this life with me felt terrifying at first. I didn’t know them, didn’t know how to trust them. I most certainly did not know how to love them, just as I didn’t know how to love myself.
But it is a choice that I make every day to learn how. We learn to communicate, to share, to respect each other’s boundaries. To keep the little ones safe, and remind them that they, too, are loved.
Most importantly, we choose now to give ourselves the good things. We try to choose good food for our body and mind, and to not hold back the things that we don’t feel good enough for. Choose good sleep, good friends, good relationships, good therapists. Choose the things that are healthy for you, even if you don’t feel like you deserve them yet.
You Deserve It.
You do.
Treat yourselves like you treat a loved one. If you would give it to a beloved friend, family member, or pet, why do you withhold it from yourself?
What do you need to do to fall in love with yourself? To truly and completely care for yourself? To be honest with yourself when that question is hard to answer?
Choose love. Always.
Benefits of Subscribing to DW
Dissociative Writers vision is to provide a safe group
where we can support one another in our writing as survivors and people with dissociative disorders,
and to use the creativity that helped us survive to tell our stories.
When you subscribe to Dissociative Writers, you receive many benefits. They include (but are not limited to):
Participating in as many workshops a month as you wish (both traditional and writing-in-place),
Attending DW monthly meetings to help guide the growth of DW,
Submitting writing to DW’s annual anthologies,
Receiving a discount on DW Beginners Memoir Class,
Getting to know others better by participating in “Social Hangout,”
Receiving other support from DW as needed, and
Receiving satisfaction in knowing you are supporting Dissociative Writers in their creative and healing processes.
Subscribe here for $10 monthly or $100 annually. Full scholarships are offered, no questions asked. Funds received are kept in the DW bank account and overseen by our Treasurer and the DW monthly meetings. They are used for administrative purposes to help sustain DW longterm.
🕊
Talk to yourself like someone you love.
~ Brene Brown
Lyn