I love Lizzo. She is such an amazing leader: she lives by example, she lives authentically, and she speaks out to challenge the beliefs and norms that make up the status quo.
Earlier this week, Lizzo won an Emmy Award for her show, Watch Out for the Big Grrrls and in her acceptance speech, she tearfully spoke of her journey to see people like her in the media and her reckoning with learning to love herself. She has said that her journey to love herself started with asking, “are you going to hate yourself for the rest of your life?” It’s either hate or love.
Whoa.
When I heard that, I thought about the self-talk I hear in my own head. There isn’t much love there: there is a great deal of criticism, a lot of blame, an unhealthy dose of shame, and definitely some guilt. And this lifetime of negative messaging has led to anxiety, self-doubt, and challenge for me, but also for my children. My self-talk has become their own self-talk.
Even through education, reflection, and working with a therapist, most days I have a hard time saying that I like myself and I can’t get close to saying that I love myself.
I can acknowledge that I have grown – that I have worked through challenges and that I am better than I was, but I still see my faults and other people’s judgements as tallies in the “not worthy” column. And there is definitely part of me that sees loving myself as “bad” – is that a Catholic thing? Loving who you are is not vanity, it’s a celebration of your being: it’s owning who you are and the journey that you are on.
Have you ever taken an Enneagram assessment? I took one yesterday, and I read the whole report. It was fascinating to me that it was so accurate. It summarized so much of what I think of as faults or what makes me different and gave me a lens to see myself in a kinder and gentler way. Maybe, like Lizzo, I can learn to love even those parts of me that are different and show up confident in who I am and feeling good as hell.
So, my challenge to myself this week is to use gratitude as a lever for love: love for my family, love for my co-workers, and love for myself. If I can focus on gratitude, I can bring myself closer to loving myself and others more fully and without the inner voice of criticism.
As Lizzo would say, it’s about damn time.
