How to Cope: Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Loving Yourself, But, Like, On Steroids Or Something, I Don't Know, Who Left Me In Charge of Entitling These Chapters, Anyway?
Here's a fun challenge for you. I want you to find the nearest mirror, or phone camera, or any reflective surface. Anything will do, as long as you can see yourself. Now look into your eyes and say, “I'm better than everyone else.” Say it once. Say it twice. Say it three times.
Did you complete that exercise? Well, then you failed. If you were really in love with yourself, you would have been way too distracted by your own image to be able to even start, much less complete the exercise. Don't get down on yourself or anything, though, because that defeats the purpose, as well. But keep on practicing self love, and you will be able to pass this test soon enough.
If you did pass, then good on you. There's nothing you can gain from this chapter. Move on to chapter two. Congratulations, you overachieving little scamp.
But let's say you didn’t pass, yet. Let's say you love yourself, but not enough to pass the test I just gave. What do you do? Well, that's where we're going to start.
I'm gonna have to start by giving you a challenge. What we're going to do is create a list. Two lists, to be precise. First, I want you to create a list of ten things you love about yourself. It can be anything, from the way your eyes sparkle at twilight, to your quirky and totally unique personality that nooobody else is ever going to imitate. Literally anything about you that makes you happy. And, hey, I'm not one to control you. If you feel like going on after ten things, because there's just so much for you to love, then by all means, keep going. Just make sure you have at least ten.
The second list is going to seem counterproductive at first, but just hear me out. What I want you to do is write a list of ten things you hate about yourself. If you run out of things you hate (I know I did), then just think about things that you don't particularly like. And if you find there are more than ten, and you want to keep going, then do. And this might make you feel bad, at first, but trust me, this is all going to turn around in just a sec.
All right, Now that you have your two lists, I want you to set the first one aside. Those are all great. You love yourself quite a lot, and that's wonderful. No need to change those.
Now you're going to take the second list, and we're going to spin this a little bit. Think about it this way: suppose you're in a committed relationship. And you love your partner, right? Well, you know that thing you do when you're in love with another person, that you become blind to their flaws, until you break up and realize that they were all types of wrong for you, and they were actually a huge dick who didn't want you to be able to express yourself in the only way your current financial and political positions allowed you to do, and he and his brother ganged up on you in front of your boss and got you in trouble for doing absolutely nothing wrong? Yeah so love makes you blind, huh? Well, that's what I want you to think about yourself. Because if you become blind to the things that make people hate themselves, it will free you. It will free you into being able to love yourself more.
But how do I propose we do this, you may be asking? I mean, I've seen people tell you to write things you want to forget about and then burn them, because that somehow fixes it, but in my experience, that doesn't work. Because now it’s etched even more into your memory, because you wrote it all down. Burning it is just a formality to make you think you did something productive.
Well, then how do I plan to get you to forget? Well, these things about you, you're likely to never forget. Especially if this is what comes to mind when you think of what's wrong with you. But what I'm going to do is use that to my advantage. Or, more precisely, to yours. Here's what we're gonna do: take every bad thing about you, and turn it into something good. For instance, if you wrote down, “I have an attitude problem,” turn it into, “I'm one sassy bitch, aren't I?” If you wrote, “My eyes aren't blue,” write, “Hitler loved blue eyes, didn't he?” And so on and so forth. Because now that you're holding on to these things forever, you can't look at them in a negative light, anymore. Because what you focus on becomes your reality. And if you can focus on the light in the darkness,the diamond in the rough, you'll be able to love yourself no matter what you do. Once you take all these things and turn them around in your favor, you can begin to look at yourself as less of a self, and more of a lover, more of a beloved, more of a being who is superior to those around you. This is a technique that even I utilize on a frequent basis. If I make a mistake and slap a dumb little kid who just happens to be the daughter of your ruthless boss, well, even that I'm able to spin around and find the positive in all of it. And maybe something like that takes practice, but the only time for you to start is now, and the only direction to go is forward. And forward we will go.
One of the greatest writers in history, apparently, is George Orwell. I mean I had this coworker who would not shut up about him and his works. He also played the saxophone, and everyone hated him, like, even our boss. One George Orwell book that he mentioned a lot was Animal Farm, which, I guess, is a great satire of some rushing era, or stalling war, or whatever, I don't really care. He's dead, anyway, so how good can his work be? Well, one day, this coworker asked me to read it, and it wasn't even all that long. I mean, my book is longer than his, and I'm not even finished. So we can see who the better writer is, am I right? (Or should I say, am I WRITE? Haha, no, if you laughed at that, you're what's wrong with the world. Fix yourself.) Well, anyway, I read it so he would shut up about it, and it was just as boring as I thought it would be. There were animals, and they started a rebellion, and created an animal hierarchy. They wrote down all these rules and then changed them so they would work better and stuff. And one of the rules really stuck out to me. It was, “Four legs good, two legs bad.” And after the animals changed the rule, it was, “Four legs good, two legs better.” And those two lines stuck with me, because the improvement of the rule highlights everything I feel about myself in comparison to the rest of the world.
Allow me to explain. There's a type of self love that I find to be very toxic. It's the kind where you put other people down in order to make yourself seem better by comparison. And that's wrong in all types of ways. It makes other people more likely to dislike you, which makes you more likely to dislike yourself, and the entire self love concept comes crashing down. And that's not what we're here for. And that's the kind of logic I think the animals were following when they came to the conclusion that four legs were good, but two legs were bad. They were trying to put down the humans who had two legs because they felt bad about walking on four legs, and they were trying to level out the playing field. And that's not really a good thing.
But the kind of self love I want to teach you is much different. It's the kind where you don't have to tear somebody down in order to feel good about yourself. You can acknowledge that you're better than other people without it being a negative attribute on that other person. Which is why I liked the changed rule of, “Four legs good, two legs better.” See, in the beginning of the story, the pigs walked on four legs. And they didn't like it. They later changed themselves so they could walk on two legs (and that's a perfectly okay thing to do, which I promise I'll talk about very soon). And when they changed the rule, they didn't have to tear down the other animals to make them feel good about walking on two legs. They didn't say, “Four legs bad, two legs good.” They let the other animals know that they were still good for walking on four legs, but just letting them know that they've become better with their transition.
This is the kind of self love that I'm here for. When you love yourself, it can be very easy to fall into the trapping of tearing everyone else down, because they're not you, and I know how tempting that can be, because I, too, make that mistake on certain occasions. But it doesn't have to stay that way. In fact, it shouldn't. What I want you to do when you catch yourself thinking unjustly negative thoughts about someone, just look at them and think about what it is you thought was bad, and remind yourself that it can be good. And once you do that, you can think back to yourself, and why the part of you that closely relates to that is better.
Let me give you an example. A while ago I had this friend at work. She worked under me for a while, and she and I grew pretty close. She's Chinese, but her hair wasn't as straight as most Asians. Her hair grew out in cute little black ringlets. Not even, like, kinky ringlets that were ugly and difficult to manage. They were subtle, and soft, and the cutest thing I had ever seen. She later made the choice to bleach her hair, which is perfectly okay with me. I actually liked her hair better when it was that cute light brown. But then she cut it short and started to straighten it every day. And I did everything in my power to stop her, because to me, that was the worst look in the world. And I made that known to her. But then I took a step back and thought about it. This was what she wanted to do, and who was I to judge what she wanted to do with her own hair? Now, I caught this mistake before any feelings were hurt, and I told her than I thought her hair looked great. What I didn't tell her was that I thought the way I styled my hair was objectively superior. But I suppose she didn't really need to know that.
You absolutely have to be careful when you do this, though. Because you could end up enabling people to do bad things or to be bad people. You really have to be able to know what behaviors are bad, and what behaviors are not. Not being bad doesn't necessarily make it good, though. It can be somewhere in between, and it could be neutral. So if someone says something that isn't necessarily good, you don't need to assume that it's bad. But still, there are people who will do bad things, and if you tell yourself that's good, you could easily be setting yourself up to be abused and taken advantage of. So there is definitely an edge that you shouldn't cross in terms of what to accept. But where is that edge? Well, that's up to you, because with every person, it's different. But I'm willing to trust that if you truly love yourself, you'll know when somebody crosses the line.
Now here you are, and you're able to determine that you are better than everyone else. But some of you may be thinking that you could already do that, and you just want to know how to go about your daily life with this mindset! Well, don't fret, my little reader muffins. I'm getting there. Just be patient, you ungrateful little swamp monster.