no more trying to be nonchalant! be chalant!

and mom, i am sorry for ever being embarrassed by you.

…and then there i was, walking into target in my brandy melville rosa sweatpants that have grease stains and a major hole on the right butt cheek, crocs on and snoopy jibbitz strapped. i didn’t give a flying fig what i looked like or who i saw, and i thought to myself, “maybe this is what self love is.”

not shrinking yourself to be smaller. not putting on plumping lip gloss and taking a fiyah selfie. not finally getting the guy.

finally getting yourself.

we lose a lot of who we are in trying to win the approval of others, and so many of us never take a step back and ask “wait, do i even approve of myself?”

when i was a kid i was so prone to embarrassment by things my mom did. now let me be the first to say say, my mom is my number one substack reader and i love you girl, you are my best friend, and yet still sometimes i would be embarrassed when your underwear was poking out of your jeans when you squatted down to buy protein bars at the store. i’m sorry diva. i am. because now i get it. i really do.

speaking of my mom and me: i vividly remember being in middle school and going to the grocery store where they always had soup samples. i’m tempted to say i was a bitch at this period in my life, but i think i also was just twelve years old and maybe that’s its own thing. anyway, my mom got a little soup sample and was sucking it down like a shot with no spoon, and i said something snarky about it to her. she turned around, looked at me, and said “you’re walking home.”

and walk home i did.

who else got chills…

i am fully aware that i was the antagonist in this situation. but for some reason i had such a preoccupation with optics and wanting to seem perfect, and as someone who is now on the other side of this, i can tell you it is a much more loving act to let yourself be who you are, have the quirks you have, and do whatever feels fucking comfortable than it is to try to make yourself as presentable and universally acceptable as you can.

it feels so good to not care. it feels so good to dance in the street because i’m feeling silly (NO ONE PULL UP THAT PHOTO OF THE WOMAN WITH A BAG OF CHIPS ON HER HEAD IN THE FROZEN FOODS AISLE). it feels so good to wear the sweatpants with the visible hole in the butt cheek and not care if the cashier thinks you’re cute. it feels so good to be me, even if that means being cringe sometimes.

we live in an age where so many of us are breaking our backs trying to seem like we don’t care. the irony is there is so much effort that goes into trying to perceived as nonchalant.

stop it! NOW! imagine i am hitting you really hard with a stick.

we spend hours curating photo dumps and wondering what we should choose for the cover photo to seem the most like we don’t care but we also want it to be cool enough to drive up enough engagement that people will want to scroll to the end of it.

we participate in strenuous beauty routines and procedures to seem effortlessly and naturally beautiful so we can prove that we really did “wake up like this” after a night spent with lip stain on, heatless curlers in, eyelashes and eyebrows freshly dyed, cooter shaved and exfoliated, nose freshly filled or something like that.

we wait 15 minutes to text them back because they took 10 minutes to respond to us to show that we really don’t care that much about whether this talking stage goes anywhere knowing full well we could not stop briefly turning our phone over, checking for a notification from them while we were pretending to listen to our friend’s life updates over drinks.

i don’t think any of that is self love.

i question the possibility of someone who spends their lives doing everything they can to win as much approval as possible to fully love themselves. i’ve reached a point in life where i feel like true self love is not caring and… actually not caring.

i don’t care anymore. maybe that’s just what being 23 is.

don’t get it twisted. i do care, about many things. i care about my family. i care about my friends. i care about animals. i care about writing. i care about running. i care about reading. and i care so much about these things that i’ve realized how i look and how i present myself and how people perceive me is just… no longer a priority.

while i have always been me, i think this season of my life is ushering a new level of self-acceptance. at the end of may, right before i broke up with my boyfriend, i made it a goal to become my own best friend. i want to have my back in all situations and know that i have such a strong foundation in my relationship with myself that i just know in my gut i will always be okay. i want to be my own biggest fan and walk away from situations that don’t serve me. i want to love myself the way i would love my own daughter.

i feel that i finally have that. i am my best friend, and i love treating myself with tenderness, acceptance, and compassion and humor. i love doing things that feel good for me, and pushing through to do the uncomfortable things because i know it’s going to help future me.

i hope everyone is able to find that for themselves. because it is so freeing when your existence is for yourself, and you’re not trying to be anything for anyone (and i sincerely hope you’re not trying to be everything for anyone). because the reality is you never will be. there will always be someone who thinks you’re too much, or not enough, or annoying, or naive for being kind, or whatever. and it just doesn’t matter.

you don’t get a chance to do your life over, or do it differently next time, so why waste your precious time and energy on people who are bent on misunderstanding you? some people won’t like it, but this journey isn’t for them (hallelujah!) and i guarantee that anyone who hates on you for loving yourself is someone who doesn’t love themselves.

and you know what? i hope one day they get there too.