A Love Letter To Myself: You Will Fucking Be Okay

Sometimes we have to love ourselves most and best of all.

A broken heart is a messy fucking thing.

Whatever the loss that caused it, it’s spiky. Splintery. The little shards of broken seem to embed themselves, with barbs, in all the most tender places. And they shift and move around as you get up and try to trudge through the fog, digging in when you’re trying to do something—anything—productive and proving themselves to be right inconvenient and cruel assholes when you are at your most vulnerable.

This past year has given me so much fucking heartbreak that I’d really like to write a strongly-worded letter to management, but then I’m reminded that I am fucking management, at least as it relates to how I respond to the situations put in front of me. No one is fucking coming to save me, so once again, I will fucking save myself.

On a whim, I was walking through Basic Bitch Disneyland the other day (aka Target) and wandered through the book aisle with my basic bitch Starbucks drink in hand. I committed the deadly sin of walking into that fucking store with an empty cart, no list, and those annoying fucking heartbreak barbs being particularly sharp and shifty that day so I tried to outrun them via retail therapy and farmhouse home decor. Then something caught my eye.

In the area with all the mindfulness and poetry books—nothing like my usual fare, mind you—a book stared at me with the title the way forward in lowercase letters like some annoyingly zen master reaching out to me and saying “hey, you, quit fucking ignoring how much you really need someone else’s pretty words right now”. Actually, I’m pretty sure a mindfulness teacher wouldn’t be as sweary as I am, but in my head they are. So.

I flipped open the book in the store, and because the universe is not without a fucking sense of humor, I landed on this page right in the middle, and the audacity of these words to assault my eyes:

it is normal to feel down, tired

and emotionally exhausted when

you are going through a big transition

especially when you have to let go

of something good for the chance

at something better

great changes are not meant to be easy;

they arise to inspire your growth

yung pueblo, you fucking asshole.

So after I flung away the tear that escaped down my face standing in that stupid and unfair book aisle, I bought the damn thing and took it home with me so that I could lean on someone else’s wisdom when my own was feeling like it had abandoned ship.

I’m so mad at my mom for being fucking gone right now because I desperately need her to tell me that I’m beautiful and amazing and that I’m going to be okay. But because she had the temerity to fucking die on me and the wooden box on the mantle doesn’t dole out quite the same hugs that she did, I decided that the person who needed to love me right now is…me.

I’ve long looked around me at people who have had a lifetime of love, managed to find their partner in a sea of absolute and unadulterated chaos, and been envious. Truthfully, I didn’t have a lot of great examples growing up. My parents divorced when I was 18 after several years of turmoil, affairs, and discord. Afterward, my dad remarried (unceremoniously deciding that his own fucking children didn’t need to be told or invited to the wedding) to someone I never grew close to, mostly because she was fucking mean to me a lot. My mom never did, and I think she was forever in love with my dad even while she repeatedly instilled in me that I didn’t need some fucking man in my life. I think in part that her bitterness combined with my parents’ dysfunctional love stories and my own battered and bruised self-esteem meant two things: 1) I didn’t feel like I was allowed to want a partner because that somehow made me weak or pathetic and so 2) If there was an olympic sport for picking relationships doomed to fail, I was a regular fucking gold medalist. Daddy issues? You fucking betcha.

Anyway, after I read through this inconveniently on-the-nose book and dogeared pretty much every other page to come back and read when the proverbial rug slips from beneath my weary feet, I glommed onto a singular important concept: I am the one who has to love me through this. Aside from my family, no one has loved me fiercely for years upon decades, including me. In fact, I’ve been a downright dick to myself for most of my life. But the best gift I can give myself when love leaves me is to give myself the love, care and acceptance I need. So, this morning when I was doing my Morning Pages, I wrote myself a love letter. Here’s what it said:

Dear Amber,

I know you’re hurting right now. The ache is real, the loss is felt, and the gloom feels really hard to walk through. But I need you to know something.

You are doing this. And you will fucking be okay.

You can go slowly if you need to. But you will learn to tend to your own heart now. You will honor the journey you’ve been on to get to this place. You will embrace putting your feet on a new path that feels different and even though you can’t see around the corners, you will trust that the softness in your heart that has brought you this far will continue to serve you and you will absolutely not harden it out of fear. Your softness is part of your beauty, and you will not let the storm limit what you can see ahead.

Storms are temporary. Unpicking old knots and healing over new wounds is a long-term project and you are really good at staying the course. This is all a gateway to brighter things and an opportunity to remember that you are, as yung told you yesterday, more than a match for what scares you.

I will always look after you. You are amazing, tender, beautiful of mind and heart and full of so much to give. Your time is not just coming, it’s now. Walk forward, breathe past that squeeze in your chest, and know that you are embarking on an era where you love yourself best of all.

We feel so we can live. Go live. It will be worth the hurt, I promise. I love you.

Love,

Amber

Go live, motherfuckers. Write yourself that letter and love yourself best of all. Time isn’t stopping for any of us.

And you will fucking be okay, too.