Is Your Self-Love Performative?

Performative self-love is surface level and missing the inner relationship required to truly start to feel differently about yourself. I was totally into the performative self-love arena in the beginning of my journey. I started to post pictures on social media that I wouldn’t have shared before. I talked a lot about mindset and used affirmations. I thought bubble baths were self-love. It was all very high vibe-ish and bypassy. I was overcompensating for a huge void of unworthiness I didn’t want to feel. And truly, I didn’t know any better back then and I love that part of me for trying.

The thing is I wasn’t really in an attuned relationship with all parts of myself, or even my body at that point. I’ve deepened into something I don’t even refer to as self-love anymore.

The more I get to know various parts of myself and learn how to attend to their feelings.

The more I feel my grief, my shame, my jealousy, my rage, my fear, my helplessness, my bitchiness, my anxiousness, my resentfulness.

All the parts of me I’d exiled into the shadow.

The more I feel their experience and change my relationship with them them, the more I settle into this something else.

As I started to understand the ways in which these parts of me were trying to help me belong or feel safe.

As I started to understand the needs of these younger parts of me and learned how to begin to meet them.

As I befriended my inner critic.

I started to feel something else. I started to find self-acceptance. Self compassion filled my chest and softened my edges.

Instead of running from and avoiding and rejecting parts of myself, as I began to accept them, I began to feel more whole and more full. As I saw these parts of me through new eyes I realized that I’d never been broken. I developed self-trust, self-esteem, self-respect and self-regard, because I developed my sense of Self. I started to sense who I was at my core separate from those around me.

This began to fill me up. And maybe this feeling of fullness, could be likened to self-love. There’s a beingness quality to it. From desperately shy to contently okay within self. And this embodied type of self-love doesn’t mean I never experience doubt or fear or shame. It does mean that I keep practicing turning towards and tending to those parts of me. No longer making them wrong and trying to ascend my humanity.