I am just going to start writing about stuff that hits my radar. I was chatting to my spiritual mentor the other day about self-love and the concept of it, which has prompted this post. Everywhere you look, people are preaching it like gospel: “Just love yourself.” They say it like it’s brushing your teeth. Simple. Daily. Hygienic. Except it isn’t.

Because your subconscious isn’t stupid. It’s got the receipts—every fuckup, every cruel word, every silence that cut deeper than a scream, every time you betrayed yourself or someone else. Your subconscious is an elephant; it never forgets. So when you stand in front of the mirror chanting I love myself with a sticky note mantra and a shaky smile, that inner mammoth smirks. “Really? After all that? You expect me to buy it?”

Self-love gets tossed around like it’s a bath bomb. Bubble baths, face masks, journaling with a lavender candle—don’t get me wrong, those things are beautiful. But that’s not self-love. That’s self-comfort. And comfort without courage becomes sedation.

This is why the whole self-love gospel feels hollow. Because love, in its truest form, can’t be forced. You don’t get to leapfrog over your shadow, plaster lavender affirmations over old wounds, and call it healing. You can’t bully yourself into love. And you don’t need to. What you need is grittier, harder, and infinitely more freeing: self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance is not glamorous. It doesn’t come with rose quartz rituals or Instagram-worthy mantras. It’s not a spa day. It’s standing in front of the jury of your own mind, facing the evidence, and saying: Yes. I did that. I screwed up. I hurt people. I failed. And I’m still here. I still get to exist. Acceptance doesn’t erase the record. It doesn’t pretend the darkness never happened. It does something braver: it allows the shadow to live alongside the light.

That’s the part no one wants to tell you. Self-love is a feeling, and feelings shift. One day you’ll feel unstoppable; the next, you’ll feel like human garbage. If your worth depends on whether you feel love for yourself in that moment, you’re screwed. But acceptance doesn’t care how you feel. It just holds the line: You are allowed to exist, even on your worst day.

Think of it like this: you don’t always love your friends or your partner. Some days they drive you insane. But the bond stays, because you’ve chosen not to abandon them. That’s loyalty. That’s what self-acceptance is—choosing not to abandon yourself when you’re at your worst.

The self-love industry skips that part because it doesn’t sell well. It’s hard to market “accept your shame and failures” on a pastel journal cover. What sells are slogans: “Be your own soulmate.” “Radiate positivity.” “Fall in love with yourself first.” But here’s the thing—your subconscious hears those words and laughs. Because it still remembers when you ghosted that friend, cheated on that test, swallowed your truth, or hurt someone who trusted you. It remembers the nights you couldn’t face the world and spent days doomscrolling in sadness, silently judging you from the inside out. Your subconscious is not buying the Hallmark version. You can’t romance yourself into wholeness. You can’t manifest amnesia.

But you can sit with the wreckage. You can pull up a chair in your own ruins and say: “I’m not leaving.” That’s not sexy. That’s not Instagram-worthy. But it’s real.

When you live this way long enough—when you stop clawing at yourself, when you quit the war—you sometimes stumble into love. Not the manufactured kind, but real tenderness. A flicker of sunlight breaking through a boarded-up window. It comes in moments: forgiving the teenage you who only knew how to survive, softening toward the body you once called ugly, catching yourself mid-criticism and replacing it with a breath. Tiny mercies. That’s love sneaking in through the cracks.

But you don’t chase it. You don’t need to. Because the point was never love. The point is to stop abandoning yourself.

And maybe that’s the only kind of love that’s ever real—the kind that grows accidentally out of loyalty. Not a fireworks display, not a constant high, but a steady hand that doesn’t let go when you fall apart.

So forget the bath bombs. Forget the slogans. If you want the real deal, practice the courage to accept the whole archive—every shame, every failure, every fuckup—without flinching, without erasing, without running. Look at yourself and say: You’re still mine.

Self-love might be the myth, but self-acceptance is the miracle. Not sexy. Not marketable. But real. And real is enough. MORE than enough.