Love Yourself Rough

Love yourself roughly.

Yes, roughly.

Roughly because humans are not smooth surfaced and easy to understand. We are not sanded down on the edges, buffered into place to become soft representations of what we should be, not accepting ourselves as we are.

Love yourself roughly because you have to love yourself roughly. If you don’t take the time to stop,admire every crease and every corner of your skin, caressed your flesh and bone like it is something organic and potent, meant to be on this Earth to strive and thrive, you will constantly fall short of loving yourself thoroughly and holistically.

You cannot love the softness of your fingertips, without loving the roughness of the soles of your feet.

You cannot love the strength of your arms, without loving the softness of your middle.

You cannot love the way a lover looks at you, without loving how you’ve learned to look at yourself.

Love is a fluid idea, and it's constantly changing in form. We can love things in different ways, from high spirited to quiet, and everything that falls somewhere in between. Loving something or someone is an impactful form that love comes in, but it will never be as powerful as learning the skills you need in order to love yourself.

These skills are hard to master, yes, with all the influences in the world telling you that in order to love yourself, you must be one way or another, appear a certain way, or behave in another. Influences can tell you that you’re not worthy of love UNLESS you fix this or that, altering who you are in a sense to make yourself seem more lovable, when in actuality it only serves to make yourself into someone else entirely.

Society behaves as if you were to buffer out those edges, smooth all those lines, and fill in the gaps, that you yourself will love yourself more because the WORLD will simultaneously love you more.

This assertion, however, is desperately false.

This assertion, however, takes away all that is impactful about loving you, and instead trains you to love specific things, ideas, and products to change who you are, and morph you into a you that you could someday, but really never, obtain.

And that is why we must all start loving ourselves roughly. We must love ourselves exactly as we are, brave and open with our “imperfections” as they are the parts of us that make us different, unique, and real.

Instead of smoothing over the surface, and glossing over what we think we should be as human beings, stopping to analyze our flaws before we believe that we’re worthy of our own love, stop for a moment and think.

Is your lover any less beautiful because of their scars?

Is the sunset any less magnificent because of it’s clouded streaks?

Is life any less meaningful because it is imperfect?

Start loving yourself the way you love the world.

Openly.

Roughly.

And infinitely.

You’re worth taking the time to do so.