You are who you are

Be fearless as you look at yourself. You are what you are. Take a deep breath and accept that for better and for worse, you are you. No one else is going to give you this kind of approval without extracting a sky-high price.

Love that part of your body that really bothers you—the crook in your nose, the extra roll on your belly, the double chin. As you love it, others will grow to love you in your totality as well. Analyzing your childhood is helpful only for a little while. Then you have to muster the courage and determination to get on with life—and with love, beginning with you. Start accepting your flaws and faults, loving every new wrinkle you see in the mirror, and holding everything that happened to you in your childhood and your life as a lesson and a gift.

Then you can stop pretending to be someone you are not. You can drop the mask of perfection together with the mask of the village idiot. Both are false, they are the masquerade we adopt in order to hide from ourselves, and keep the world from seeing us as we really are. Show yourself in all your flawed beauty. Don’t hide anything from the world or from yourself.

To practice loving yourself, cook a scrumptious meal when you are alone. Know that you have a heavenly guest coming for a feast: you! Don’t make a peanut butter and banana sandwich, prepare a healthy feast. Light a candle, set some flowers, bring out the linen napkins, know that you are the one you’ve been waiting for and you are coming to dinner tonight.

Dress as if you love yourself, eat as if you love yourself, forgive as if you love yourself, act as if you love yourself. Unconditioned love is a habit that has to be developed. You cannot get to it by chewing on the reasons why you can’t. You get to it by breaking the habit of conditioned love, which is the kind of love we learned while growing up. You break this habit by loving yourself unconditionally.