The most radical act of love that anyone can perform is kindness to themselves.
You cannot pour from an empty cup. How many times have you heard this statement or some iteration of it? This statement is entirely true. A car cannot get to operate without fuel, a remote doesn’t work without batteries, and you cannot give a healthy love to others while being hurtful, overly-critical, and dismissive of yourself. We live in a culture that’s so material that we view self-care as spending on luxuries, and self-love as using those luxuries (beauty products, cars, clothes, etc) to temporarily mask our pain or distract us from what we don’t like about ourselves and our lives.
But self-love is so much deeper than that. Self-love is about how you think of yourself when no one else is around, how you feel about the person that you see in the mirror, and the kindness with which you speak to that person. So many of us have fallen into patterns of negative self-talk and self-loathing so long ago that this is our default; we don’t even bother questioning the hurtful and destructive things that we say to and think about ourselves. But the kindest thing that anyone can do is to question this, aggressively and often, to apologize to and forgive themselves, and to heal their relationship with themselves by giving themselves unconditional love, all the time.
