Over the Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love

Just because we mess up doesn’t mean all the lessons we learned are undone. Healing can be imperfect.

As scary as this can be I want you to know no matter how broken you feel, and how seemingly unlikely it is, we are never too broken to heal.

You know those plants that are always trying to find the light? Maybe they were planted in a location that didn’t necessarily facilitate growth, but inexplicably they make a circuitous route to not only survive but bloom into a beautiful plant. That was me—my whole life.

Imperfection is beautiful. To anyone who has ever felt broken beyond repair, this is for you. If you’ve ever been excluded, or told you were not enough, know that you are enough, and beautifully complete.

We are all a beautiful jumble of layers, parts, and mixtures of experiences, but my most important part, and in my opinion everyone’s most valuable part, is the one that chooses self-love instead of self-harm in the grand sweeping ways but also the little ways every single day. Learning to parent yourself, with soothing compassionate love, forgiving yourself, and learning from all the decisions you made to get you to where you are - that’s the key to being fulfilled. Learning to be the dream parent cheerleader to yourself. It’s been in you the whole time. And no matter how down you get, you can always make a gorgeous recovery.

I got paralyzed by things. I’m pretty sure that ‘I hate uncertainty’ was my first full sentence as a baby.

It wasn’t until I had lost everything I thought I wanted that I realized being an adult wasn’t about being ‘normal,’ or having a life that seems enviable to people from the outside. Being a fulfilled and successful adult has required accepting that I do have an inner child who was hurt and traumatized. It’s my job as an adult to nurture him, alongside all the other parts of me that make me who I am.

Because when you have this much personality, there’s a fear lurking just below the surface: If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that acceptance is the key to so much, and we find so much freedom in feeling fierce about what we’re accepting.

Letting go of that idea that I needed to be normal or that I somehow wasn’t normal just because I needed to prioritize self-care to be healthy is the biggest gift I’ve ever given myself. Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same.

There are endless sexy shapes, colors, forms, and kinds of people who deserve celebration. It’s each one of our jobs to reject that comparison of what we think beauty is and realize we are the motherfucking beauty.

Being normal is being completely unique, because nobody’s the same. Normal, honey? Who is she, anyway?

There’s a rhyme and reason behind my effervescent spirit, and no, I did not wake up like this. It took a lot of trauma and tears to become the person you see today.

You can’t be fiercely loving without also being passionate - and sometimes passionate isn’t pretty. What might seem testy is actually scar tissue, the residual effects of trauma that I lived through.

Life is so much a daily exercise in learning to love yourself and forgive yourself, over and over.

Joy can live beside sorrow. Life is messy, unpredictable, and seldom tied into neat little boxes.

Comparing ourselves to people on social media is as risky as using WebMD to diagnose yourself. You’ll end up way more stressed than before - just don’t even go there.

Our grief was leading us all towards Mexican food.

There are a million ways to reach recovery. Don’t let anyone tell you you can’t find a way that works for you.

So I’m telling my story - the whole story - to show that some masterpieces start off a mess.

One thing I have come to notice in my life is that recovery for me has not been linear. It’s more two steps forward, three back, five forward, two back, so I’m always improving but there are setbacks within the improvement.

Joyful accomplishments exist next to painful memories. I found a lot of my healing when I realized that my suffering didn’t undo my joy.

My default is to be really critical of myself, but the world will do that for me, so I gotta make sure I always know I have my back.

no matter how much my life changes I am enough, and I am loved in and of myself and by myself, I’ll be good.

I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.

Just like joy and pain coexist, so can discomfort and humor. Which is why you gotta buckle up buttercup, because I can go from comedy to tragedy in three seconds flat. And that’s not damaged or not normal. I hope culturally we can continue to normalize the idea that being a survivor is so much more common than anyone realizes and we all deserve to be heard, but more importantly are deserving of a recovery full of love, laughter, and light.

Cheering on a corrupt institutional body that’s super problematic with money and opportunity but we all pretend like it’s an equal playing field and celebrate it—what’s more American than that?

the more you love and accept yourself, the less you need other people's approval.

At the end of the day, the people we let in our space affect our ability to get to where we want to go, so if they're in the way of realizing your potential, it's okay to disconnect because you must choose yourself.