What Does it Mean to Like Yourself?
“How much do you like yourself?” he asked me. I gave him a blank stare.
“I love myself…I mean…”
No, I didn’t ask, “Do you love yourself? I asked how much you like yourself,” my husband replied somewhat impatiently.
It was one of those late night conversations that start off with the TV malfunctioning and end up in an exhausting, yet gratifying next day. You know those nights? When the episode isn’t uploaded to Hulu yet even though it’s well past the 24-hour mark? When the remote is out of batteries and you can’t find your flashlight or the old remote so you can just swap out the batteries? When the electricity is out again and you don’t have enough gas for the generator? (No? Just me? Ok, forgot most of y’all are in the U.S. unlike me. More on that later.)
In this case, we had forgotten our Netflix password & the TV had also apparently forgotten it. As my hubby was fumbling with the app and guessing the same word for the 50-11th time but this time with a 2 and an ‘!’ at the end, I figured I’d make casual conversation until we got set up and flippantly mentioned to him that I’d written forty-eight pages in a Google Doc for my anticipated blog. Forty-eight pages about our recent move to Ethiopia from Washington, D.C. with our three little kids in tow in the midst of a pandemic and a percolating civil war. Forty-eight pages of experiences that were waiting to be shared with the world. In addition to those forty-eight pages, I’d also created a blog where I could house and share these stories.
But there was an issue. There always seemed to be. More than a decade ago, when I was in college (aging myself here, I know), I had written and recorded twelve songs. Twelve songs about love, heartbreak, identity, friendships, etc. Twelve goddamn good songs, if I may say so myself. I am a classically trained pianist since the age of 3 + have a pretty good singing voice (humility is underrated) + am a super sensitive and emotional Pisces: strong recipe for a successful crooner.
Bigger than the sum of these gifts however, was my crumbling fear of rejection. So I made excuses. The excuses were always shitty. Even I knew that. My excuse for not releasing the songs I wrote was, ‘what if they are stolen?’ Looking back now, I’m like, “bro, who gon’ steal yo’ songs? Ain’t nobody checkin’ for you like that, relax.”
And let me quickly clarify something: I wasn’t afraid of hard work. Nah. I worked my ass off. I just worked at the things that were socially acceptable to my immediate circle. And what was socially acceptable to my immigrant and first-generation African family and my Ivy League school friends? Law school. So you know what I did instead of turning a three-year internship at Sony Records and Universal Music Publishing into a full-time career? I went to fucking law school. And I hated it. I was mediocre at best, bottom 50% of my class. It’s a miracle I passed the bar exam, but by the grace of God, I somehow did. At my law school graduation, people were congratulating me like I had achieved a huge life goal of mine. I feigned joy as I saw the beaming approval on all of my friends’ and family members’ faces at graduation.
Nearly 10-years later, I decided it was time to write again.
Yet again, my gift of expression was once again faced with this mountain of fear inside of me. This time around, the butt-dumb excuse I gave to my husband who was demanding to know why I hadn’t yet made the blog live if I had forty-eight pages of content was, “I haven’t optimized for SEO yet.” (SEO = search engine optimization.) Yeah, I know this sounds even dumber than, “what if my songs are stolen” and my husband was calling me out when he asked that heavy question that I had to sit with: “How much do you really like yourself?”
“What does liking myself have to do with anything?” I retorted. He earnestly replied, “because you are more afraid of others’ potential rejection than you are of letting yourself down again. But I want you to sit with this, babe. Until you acknowledge yourself, honor your talents, and do what you dream of doing, you will never truly like yourself. You may like the person you see in the mirror externally. You may even be fine with yourself. But you will never truly respect and consider Marti Marti’s homie until Marti acknowledges Marti’s talents, irrespective of rejection or any opinion from anyone other than Marti.”
DAAAAMN mic drop.
(And no, sadly he doesn’t have any single brothers or cousins – already checked for a friend. :))
That night, I went to bed and scrolled my phone as I was winding down and saw an email from Hiwote that had arrived at 11:02am inviting others to participate in her newsletter. That’s when I knew that it was God gently nudging me to write. So I reached out to H and made the promise to participate as a guest writer. I knew that I wouldn’t break my word because my fear of letting another person down - especially a writer whose work I really enjoy and respect - would outweigh my fear of rejection.
So here I write. And here, I promise to share my writings with the world. Here, I promise to try to like myself more with every blog post I share – whether I have 2 readers or 20,000. Because despite the fact that there are currently 600 million blogs in the world today and only one in five bloggers reports strong success with their blogging, there truly is no number that can quantify the inherent joy you get from affirming yourself when you pursue what you believe you were destined to.