self-acceptance

This selfie I took without foundation. Only wearing black eyeliner and Rose Flair lipstick.

As the pandemic enters the second year this is my indoor outfit:

Black-and-white striped tee shirt, black sweater jacket, and black Athleta City pants. With silver globe earrings.

The point is it’s going on the second year of the coronavirus pandemic.

I’m grateful to be alive and breathe air on a sunny day.

This is the difference–time moves on. You either move with it or you wither.

How is it that this selfie is okay? It lies in how we see ourselves. I see myself in a different light after surviving the last year.

Without altering your photo into a strange unrecognizable You I say it comes down to the super-effect of rosy lighting.

Our Zoom selves should be adored not send us running for cosmetic surgery.

At 55 I accept that I don’t have Karlie Kloss’s creamy skin. Nor will I go under the scalpel. Only 5 feet tall I won’t grace a runway either.

The day has come when I can stare at my face in the mirror and be okay with it.

For a lot of us anger is the natural reaction when we realize we wasted so much time viewing our perceived flaws under a microscope.

Today is the day to change this tune. Our time on earth is getting shorter.

The coronavirus pandemic has taught us that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed.

What I’ve learned:

To love myself better than anyone else could ever love me.

This should be the goal for all of us:

To see ourselves in a beautiful light.

Years ago a Nike print ad featured athletes with the tag line “Make Yourself.”

In the end, that’s what a person does in recovery: you have the chance to make yourself into who you want to be.

You don’t have to get a J.D. or M.D. You don’t have to do what I do.

You just have to be the kind of person that it gives you joy to be (regardless of the number on the bathroom scale).

Surprise–I think about the beauty and benefit of “self-acceptance” as a mantra in recovery.

If you’re not happy being you, ask yourself why exactly you’d rather be someone else. Change what you can of what you don’t like, and live with and forget the things you can’t change.

I’m 52–next week I will write about my 25th anniversary of being in remission.

Here now I want to write about self-acceptance because it’s the secret to feeling good about yourself. It could help to define what makes you a true original.

I would say my personality is “creative-kinetic.” Like the athletes in the Nike ad, I understand that there’s a power in creating yourself.

What I’m possessed with right now is a Deborah Harry quote. In a magazine, she said that all artists go “inching and crawling” towards their situation.

That sums up recovery: it too often involves going “inching and crawling” toward each goal; each milestone; each victory.

I will write more about recovery in here in my own inimitable way in the coming weeks–because it needs to be said what I have to say.

I’ll end here with this prelude: if you’re an artist, you cannot ever not do your art.

If you’re in recovery, you have to be true to yourself.

A good first step to embracing who you are is to remember that a mental health diagnosis is simply a tool for getting the treatment you need. It’s not who you are.

I call using your diagnosis to define yourself–I call this an “identity straitjacket.”

The beauty of living in recovery is that you get to decide how you want to describe yourself. That’s how I hit on my own two-word statement.

Try out your own self-definition. Meet me here next week when I talk about how I’ve been in remission for 25 years.

Tag: self-acceptance

In a Different Light