On this journey that I have been taking these two years, I have started to reincorporate mediation into my daily routine. I say reincorporate because I have been practicing mediation off and on for more years than I will admit to. It has always surprised me that despite my mental illnesses, I have always been good at meditation. I can easily slip into a mindset where I am only concentrating on my breathing and being present; and when I do allow my thoughts to stray, I have always been able to bring them back to the center as they say. If I stay in a session long enough, especially after doing some intense yoga, I can reach that blank space that all the gurus talk about in more fancy words than I care to do. For whatever reason, mediation isn’t hard for me.

It can be stressful because it is so easy. I often don’t find the calmness or the peace that people are always prescribing to mediation, because I am not actively trying to do anything. I am exactly where I am supposed to be in the exercise, and the ease of that doesn’t give me what I am desiring – a place to rest. Instead it’s just another place in my mind that I can go to. Not really the point of mediation. But the professionals think it will help, so here I am mediating.

Lately, I have chosen to participate in guided mediation sessions. I got the idea that listening to some kind of nature sounds and simply breathing might not be the right path for me, and nine times out of ten it’s really hard to find sounds that I find comforting. One of the things that I have learned is an absolute truth for me is that sounds are triggers. Voices surrounding me with inane conversations about what Taylor Swift is doing or why there aren’t floats in homecoming parades anymore can put me straight into an anxiety attack. Sounds of repetitive beeping, or drumming, or simple sounds of a bird chirping over and over can induce problems. Even the annual troop of high schoolers to my backyard to study my creek, induces this paranoia and need to become a master spy – simply because I can hear them talking. I have learned that noise cancelling headphones are, in fact, my friend.

So I was worried about these guided mediations because even strident voices won’t help me achieve the desired goal of calmness and being present. I will be so focused on the voice, I will neither hear my breathing or what the voice is actually saying. But I am trying. At least, this mediation is more challenging for me. And maybe that is what those professionals want.

Today, during my guided mediation session, I heard something that caught my attention and destroyed any hope of me reaching a medicative state. I have been following a guided mediation workshop about self-love and self-care. I figured if I was going to listen to something, it might as well be beneficial to me. Anyway, this voice calmly stated that we can not learn to improve or even love ourselves if we are coming from a place of inadequacy. She, unfortunately, left that statement as a one-liner and didn’t go into more details, but it was a short session so maybe she didn’t have the time. But that line stuck with me.

I am all for self-love. Go ahead, love every inch of your imperfections that are actually perfect in every way. Love your uniqueness, your individuality, your originality. I am for it. I encourage it. I celebrate anyone who can do it. Because, I can’t.

After years and years of battling these diseases, and facing the consequences of diseases that I neither asked for or did anything to acquire, I can’t find it within myself to forgive the broken pieces within me. And this causes a continual spiral that reaches each piece of me, so that there isn’t one part of me that knows the love one can feel for oneself. I can’t do it. And I try not to feel defeatist about this, I simply try to accept it, because in the long run, that might be what is healthiest for me.

Maybe self-love isn’t about looking in the mirror and finding someone beautiful but rather knowing that the blood test you just took proves that your body works exactly as it should. Maybe self-love isn’t celebrating that you go into deep depressive states, but that you have friends who are waiting for you to get better. Maybe self-love isn’t accepting the things you do when you are manic, but the times you were able to curb some of those impulses. Maybe self-love isn’t about completely loving every inch of you, but rather finding something that is unique to who you are, or finding a talent that you can hold up as an accomplishment, or even simply looking around and understanding that you are okay. Is accepting that you are okay a form of self-love? I can’t actually define self-love for you. It is subjective. It is something you should be able to celebrate for yourself, not something that some random stranger can determine for you.

But long ago I gave up the intention of ever trying to find something to love about myself. It just isn’t possible for me. Instead, I have spent years protecting myself from the truth that I don’t like myself. I don’t look in the mirror and I try really hard to avoid reflective surfaces. I once tried to see if I liked myself in candlelight because I read that everyone is pretty in that light, but it didn’t work for me. I looked like someone you would make fun of around a campsite. I don’t have friends, because I got tired a long time ago of bending myself to be something they would want to hang out with; and the exhaustion of knowing that I couldn’t ultimately be anything for everyone was simply too much. Despite the fact that I am proud of being a mother, I can’t see past the years of disappointment I have given to my children when I couldn’t be the mother they needed. There is nothing to see to love. I don’t have a romantic relationship with my husband because for too many years I have disappointed him by not being the partner he actually deserves. I won’t go too much down this road except to say, touch isn’t part of our relationship because despite the fact that he is probably the only person I could touch, I spent years not saying that. Not letting him know that. Knowing that my own brain has destroyed more relationships, more possibilities, more intentions, more happiness, more promises of a normal and comfortable life, leads to the uncomfortable knowledge that I can’t love myself. Not now, not tomorrow. I destroyed that ability a long time ago.

So I come from a place of inadequacy. I come from a place of failing before I even learned what I was actually destroying. I come from a place of weakness before I knew the power of strength. I come from ten-steps behind before I realized the importance of holding onto the things that make one someone worthy of love. And that is it in a nutshell – if you don’t feel worthy of love, you can’t find anything to love within your own self.

I like the idea that others shouldn’t define us, whether overtly or within our own heads. Maybe my children don’t feel like I destroyed their childhood. Maybe my husband is happy with the comfortability in our relationship. Maybe I don’t have friends because I quit looking. Maybe it isn’t that the world can’t find something to like about me, maybe it is my own perceptions. Maybe I have made up in my mind an excuse not to find love within me; maybe that is easier for me. But even knowing that this is a distinct possibility, because of the years of self-hate, there can’t now be self-love. Self-hate is the inadequacy that prevents the self-love that many believe is important.

And while I can definitely say self-love is something you should strive for, I have resigned myself to my own truth. And ignoring the choice to find something to love about myself, actually works for me. It keeps me from the darkness that I see as the truth. And while I admit I am inadequate, especially when it comes to the ability to find my own self-love, I simply don’t allow myself towards that inescapable knowledge.

So, I suppose the point of this post is simple: don’t do what I have done. Don’t give up on yourself. Don’t depress yourself with the knowledge that there might not be something inside of you to love. Don’t spend your life looking in the mirror and not seeing exactly who you are. Look anyway. I have to live vicariously through each of you in this one way, because I have to hope that you are so much smarter than me; that you can find that absolute truth – you are worthy of love. A great deal of it, in fact.