self love – Pith Rant

Content Note: animated gif

The source is credited as "Spiritual Energy Healing." There is a light purple background behind an image of a sandy beach with footprints. The plum-colored serif text says, "If you want to soar in life, you must learn to F.L.Y [sic] (First Love Yourself)." -Mark Sterling — The source is credited as “Spiritual Energy Healing.” There is a light purple background behind an image of a sandy beach with footprints. The plum-colored serif text says, “If you want to soar in life, you must learn to F.L.Y [sic] (First Love Yourself).” -Mark Sterling

I admit I’m biased in favor of RuPaul’s framing.

The underlying idea is the same, and I agree that it’s important.

Love yourself.

Do.

But this Mark Sterling version does more to emphasize the challenging flip-side that could hypothetically occur to people already struggling with depression and self-loathing: namely, since your own failure to sufficiently love yourself is what’s preventing you from soaring, you might as well give up on that goal of extrinsic accomplishment because it’s meaningless in the absence of the kind of self-love you can never hope to achieve because you’re such a failure anyway.

Hypothetically. Because who really has those kinds of thoughts, right?!? Gross.

This macro falls into the category of macros that basically say “You Have To Personally Do Something That Could Very Difficult But Will Be Presented As Deceptively Simple Before You Can Even Begin To Think About the Possibility of Confronting Structural And Systemic Oppression.”

Broadly, people do not struggle to love themselves entirely of their own volition.

People learn from their environments. People struggle to love themselves because they’ve been systemically oppressed, because they’ve been traumatized, because they’ve been neglected, because they’ve been abused, because they’ve been misled, and a whole host of other reasons that start with other people.

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the significance we ascribe to personal responsibility, and de-center individual confidence as a metric for success.

Then again, we could just keep shaming people for developing coping mechanisms with predictably adverse long-term effects, and reinforce the message that the way they experience feelings has been the real problem all along.

I think that shoe-horning the message into the “FLY” acronym creates some ambiguity about the scope of “first.”

Is it ordinal or imperative?

Like, 1) Love Yourself 2) Soar 3) Profit?

Or is it like, “Put yourself first, before others, in order to succeed”?

I know I’m splitting hairs here, but this is pretty hefty advice, so I want to make sure I’m following it right.

I also think that the wordplay with F.L.Y seems a little shaky, and that making SOAR into an acronym could offer more stability by way of parallelism.

Subject Others to Ardent Ramblings?

Superciliously Orate At Randos?

Succeed Over Aggravating Rumination?

Stop Overthinking And Ranting?

Generally, I acknowledge that it’s petty and irrelevant to pick at grammatical and mechanical issues instead of engaging with content.

But I’m already being petty here.

So why isn’t there a period after the Y? Is the missing period contributing meaningfully to the word play? Was there a deadline?

“This macro has to go live RIGHT NOW or the internet will never know its power! NO TIME FOR PROOFING!”

I’m also kind of fascinated by the image choice here.

I would have guessed that this photo’s only purpose would be to serve as a backdrop for that “Footsteps in the Sand” poem about how Jesus will give you a piggyback ride when you get tired from too much beach strolling.

On a light brown, dappled background, a typewriter font says, “Don’t change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love you.” In the lower left-hand corner, there is a cartoon picture of a toaster with a face high-fiving a coffee mug with a face, while a piece of toast with a face jumps out of the toaster. The logo in the lower right-hand corner is for the site “Positive Energy.”

As always, I grant that there is often a nugget (or more) of valuable insight tucked into the questionable folds of these macros.

So I’ll affirm the message that your authentic self has inherent value.

But enough of that talk.

Do you really want to hang out with anyone who goes around designating whole-ass humans as “right” and “wrong”?

“Don’t change . . . and the right people will love you.”

I can’t help reading “change is bad” as the dominant message, when “you deserve love” is probably a more salient takeaway.

I get that the macro aims to convey a simple message. “Right” people will naturally gravitate to other “right” people, who love each other as they are. But this also implies the existence of “wrong” people with the “wrong” kind of love, and dang.

That just doesn’t hold water.

Sometimes, the “wrong” people can sound a lot like the “right” people because they are enabling you to suck and/or to not really be yourself.

Sometimes self-proclaimed “right” people, who give you lots of supportive lip service, secretly thrive on shaming you from their high, high horses (and I mean tall-type high, y’all, not stoned ponies).

A lot of change-resistant folx like to invoke the defense that “I’m just being who I am / telling it like it is!” when they’re really just being intransigent assholes.

Sometimes, changing in response to the fact that people don’t like you is called “growth.”

There are always people with a vested interested in your being ignorant, downtrodden, demotivated, and dependent, and so they don’t want you to grow.

And those people just might be your family and friends, whose opinions may seem exactly like the “right” ones to value.

Those apparently “right” people might be the loudest about delivering the words to your ears that “they love you just how you are,” without bothering to specify that what they love about how you are is your willingness to permit them to suck and/or not grow.

“Be yourself” is not necessarily bad advice, but don’t fool yourself into believing that you never need to change or that “right” people even exist.

In terms of the image chosen to accompany this quote, I feel like a coffee-maker should be participating in the good times.

I mean, we’ve got toast and toaster together. Coffee and coffee-maker feels like a natural parallel, right?

The coffee is just personified by its vessel, though.

I wonder why toast is a sentient entity, but coffee is not.

Granted, I’m not aware of any liquids with personalities, but none of these characters are technically living things anyway, so at that point I don’t see why a solid state is a necessary criterion for a face.

They also all have exactly the same face, and I’m struggling with that.

It is a very cheerful face, for what it’s worth.

Anyway, when you think about it, toast is really just bread that has changed to be better liked by those who encouraged it to change in the first place.

The bread / toast depicted here always had intrinsic value, but its appliance buddies certainly seem thrilled with the outcome of the toasting.

Does this technically make them the wrong people (or people-like things) for pressuring their bread friend to change according to their preference? Or are they the right people-like things because they love that the toast is being its authentic self?

We can’t know if the bread became toast with the goal of being better liked by the coffee mug and toaster (and I question whether the toaster is able to recognize the influence of its own cultural bias).

If the bread decided to change just to earn the shallow approval of its judgey friends, then the message is kind of like, “Have a little self-respect, Bread.”

But if the change was motivated by truth-to-self rather than desire for popularity, it’s good that the appliances approve of the change, right? “Yay for Toast!”

Where does our ability to evaluate motive begin and end?

All we know for sure is that the visible impact of Bread’s choices is that it is now Toast.

Everyone looks happy, but that doesn’t mean everyone is happy.

I really want to believe that Giant Coffee Mug isn’t judging Toast because of its own projected shame.

I want to believe that Toast is living its best life, surrounded by its supportive friends.

In that case, we all deserve the kind of love that Toast has.

Remember that you are both imperfect and lovable.

Tag: self love

Learn to F.L.Y

The Right People