I’m not qualified to tell you how you should love yourself. Because sometimes I don’t even know how the heck to love myself, so this would just be me writing a block of text of advice I can’t follow. But one thing I could give a 2-hour TedTalk about is the art of giving less fucks. It’s a beautiful thing. Let me explain.
What I’ve realized in my long and awkward twenty years on this Earth is that people really most of the time don’t care. Or if they do care, they’ll care for approximately 30 seconds and then move on. It’s easy to think the opposite: that if you send that risky text or confuse a stranger at the grocery store for your mom, that it’ll haunt you forever. It’s that mindset that can hold me back from being really weird in public, and by weird, I don’t mean dangerous, creepy weird. I mean dorky weird. I mean why-is-she-dancing-like-that-vine-lady-Natasha weird.
That inner dork has intrusive wholesome thoughts like “you should tell that woman you like the color of her skirt.” And the thing is, when I do decide, hey fuck it--let’s try out that dance move or compliment that lady in the elevator or make a stupid joke or what the hell, all three simultaneously--it works out ok most of the time. Giving less fucks doesn’t mean caring less about what people think. That’s impossible and everyone knows it. It’s human nature to care about what your fellow Homo sapiens are thinking and feeling toward you. In the caveman days, a good or bad reputation probably meant the difference between life and death, to be dramatic.
Giving less fucks means caring more about the part of yourself that are sometimes really buried deep down in there--the part of yourself that could talk about dinosaurs for days and loves colored pencils. Giving less fucks means embracing the parts of yourself that you love the most and letting go of the people in your life that don’t appreciate them (easier said than done, I know, but baby steps). Giving less fucks means understanding that yeah, people will think things about you and those things matter to you, but ultimately, what you think about yourself is what you wake to every morning and listen to for the rest of your days.