Self-love is an actual thing and it's okay.

Image: Man Ray

You have to understand, I've been chewing on my cheeks in my sleep. 
Grinding my teeth, and popping out ribs on a daily basis. 
On the inside of my mouth are two bleeding rows of ulcers
and our house has smelled like Dencorub for days. 

This is pretty normal. It has been for - oh, years probably.

So, when I heard it, I almost laughed. 

I was about to sit down to begin working this morning on a to-do list that reads like an unequivocal directive to do nothing but panic non-stop until wine time.

Grind, grind; shoulders up to ears. 

I should love my work (caveat: I do love my work - in theory). But the terror that I am not doing enough I am never doing enough (in my life, for my career, for the world, etc.) means the directive to panic becomes the only real solution:

"Skip yoga today. You need the time to just work, work, work."
"Skip food today. You have to lose weight - I don't care about the perfectly ripe avocado on the bench. Don't go near it."
"You're not allowed to shower until you've ticked off at least two items on your list, so you'd better go, go, go woman."
"If you don't get a really hard, fast run in before the end of daylight hours, then you're a bad person."

and on and on. And on. 

So it was laughable when it dropped itself quietly on me. A suggestion, perhaps. Certainly not a fact - I'm not there yet. A soft, foreign concept in the pressurised dervish of my morning's mind:

"I love you."

Christ, are you fucking kidding me? No, no - that's all that internet self-help bullshit infecting your brain. "I love you." Come on. Please. What the hell is that? An excuse to have avocado?

But then subtle, subversive ideas began to accompany this tiny, ridiculous set of words. Ideas that were about really basic, simple acts of (what I am almost loathe to describe as) self-care:

Things like limiting coffee to oh, I don't know - no more than 3 cups.
Allowing myself to do one thing at a time.
Taking an actual walk in the placid winter sunshine (of which there is this tiny dappled sliver falling through my window and onto the wall in front of my right now which is helping me breathe). 

A friend linked to an article yesterday about the dialogue around the hypocrisies and necessities of self-care. Self-love. How a lot of us in creative spaces, in intellectual spaces, on the left (what have you) poo poo the idea - writing it off as a green juice and paleo instagram wet dream universe leveraged on clean, lean raw, vegan dollar dollar bills.

And look - there is imbalance and fast-commercialisation of everything of course. I once bought into the idea that in order to be "well", I too would need to somehow shoehorn myself into the-wellness-movement. But like so many of these things, it didn't (and frankly, couldn't) deliver on its promise. It was just another item (or series of items) on my to-do list.

Gnash, gnash; gnaw, gnaw.

And when you're trying to have significant independent thought that gets expressed as a complex combination of image and words and time and sound (in a world that seems to be diametrically opposed to independent thought, let's face it), spending half the day making smoothies and researching the benefits of crystal singing bowls can feel deeply redundant. If not actually kind of derailing (in a similar way that the beauty industry sells us empowerment while also draining our bank accounts and hours in the day). 

But the thing that this article ultimately spoke to, that I found quite radical, was the very raw kind of truth that we can't exist for very long on self-abuse alone.

If we've got creative, thinking or activist (or hell, even just day-to-day living) work to do, then there are certain amounts of coping tools that we need to put into place in order to make the work possible and not completely destructive to the human doing it. 

And yes - so many terms that might have once described these concepts have been co-opted by the money-hungry internet, that the phrase "self-love" sometimes barely registers as anything - let alone an idea for which there are a practical actions that might eventuate in people not killing themselves through striving through some kind of heaving status anxiety. 

If the terminology has become too easily dismissible, I think that's okay. You can call taking care of yourself so that you can get through each day whatever you like - hell, you don't have to call it anything at all. 

I obviously didn't realise that I needed a concrete idea of it to be able to look at and respond to. And that's perhaps how and why it crept into the back of my mind so subversively.

But there it is.

I love you.

Just like that. Not something I'd ever really believed before. Thought as true, as a fact. As more than an abstract concept. In fact something that most of the time I've spent believing the diametric opposite of. 

But it's sitting there now like a challenge: "what would you do if this were true?"

Well, it wouldn't mean I'd trot off to exfoliate with Himalayan crystal sea salt while I bake my own kale chips and bathe in the shit of unicorns.  That's for sure.

But I might go and take a shower - right now - and have some avocado on toast.

I might see if I could approach my work today with less clenching, and perhaps a little more delight.

And at some point, halfway through my to-do list, I might actually stop, close my computer for a second, stare at that spot of dappled sunshine on the wall and just fucking breathe. 

It won't change the world. Maybe it won't even make me a better artist. But if I can ease up on the gnawing just a little, that's probably enough of a difference to justify the (gasp, cough) self-love.