A Love Letter to Valentine’s Day, or Trusting Yourself Come Hell or High Water

 

It’s Valentine’s Day! My favorite day of the year! Better than Christmas, better than my birthday, better than tax return day! Well, tax return day used to be before I became self-employed anyway.

Eight years ago, I started imbuing this day with more meaning than all the chocolate-covered strawberries and long-stemmed roses in the land could communicate. I started making this day about loving myself—by doing the most important thing someone must do to love someone. Trust.

The thing that gets overshadowed in discussions about loving yourself is that it’s not always easy or fun. It’s not all about bubble baths and treating yourself to that cappuccino because hot damn, you deserve it! (You do, though. Go get your fancy jitter juice.)

Like any other thing that is fundamentally human, loving yourself is messy.

Waaaay back in 2012 when I was starting to figure this out, I was facing down a metric crap-ton of fear. My legs were as shaky as my voice when I said goodbye to the only home I’d known and stepped onto a plane. The fear didn’t crush me or cause me to turn back—not for lack of trying. Because of trust.

I trusted myself enough to know that I would figure it out. Whatever “it” was. I trusted myself enough to catapult through the air at a bajillion miles an hour and plop down on a tiny rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. An ocean I’d never seen before because I’d never seen any oceans before.

I then experienced what has become my favorite. sensation. on. earth. I stepped out of a giant tin can full of air that 400 other people had been exhaling $15-airport-cocktails-and-Goldfish-cracker breath in for the past six hours, walked down the jet bridge and out of the gate… and that’s when it happened. The humid air, laced with sea salt and plumeria, filled the space around me and wrapped me into this hug that somehow reached down to the core of me. It was the feeling of coming home.

The thought of it still sends prickles to the backs of my eyeballs—and elicits looks of horror from the poor shoppers wondering if the crazy lady standing at the back of the grocery checkout line with an armload of mangoes is about to have a breakdown. Not that this has ever happened.

On every single return flight, I wait for that moment. Then, when I can’t wait any longer, I become everyone’s favorite belligerent airport asshole: the fast-walker. You know, the only person there who has somewhere to be. *eye roll emoji* I’m not proud.

It never fails. Every time I step out of the gate and back into the island air, I’m greeted by that welcome home hug.

I’m not in Hawaii at the moment so there’s no tropical embrace (I’m sitting in a sun-filled office starting out the window, pretending it’s not -5 degrees. How can temperature even be negative? That’s just dumb.). But there’s a similar warm feeling at the center of me. 

February 14th isn’t the celebration of that one time I dug deep, determined to trust myself come hell or high water. It’s a celebration of all the times I’ve done so.

Valentine’s Day is also the anniversary of the day I started my own business. If moving to Hawaii having never seen the ocean was an exercise in trust, launching a business was like moving to Mars.

I wasn’t a confident kid. I was bullied and had to switch schools a bunch. I wasn’t a confident teenager either. I had an illness that kept me in bed more days than not. When I was able to show up to school, it was amidst rumors about why my presence was so rare.

My symptoms were always the worst in the mornings, but sometimes I could make it to school in the afternoon. According to the logic of my classmates, this was because I had morning sickness. For four years. That’s a loooooooong ass time to be pregnant, amigos.

None of us escape childhood without some kind of baggage. My duffel bag just happened to get filled up with the feeling that I was always behind.

Feel healthy enough to take ice skating lessons? Cool. Be the only 12-year-old in the beginner class full of 7-year-olds (And have gummy bears thrown at the back of your head by bullies in the bleachers while you’re lacing up your skates. Dicks.). Want to make out with a boy? Cool. That’ll happen freshman year of college and you’ll giggle like a nervous idiot the whole time because Am I doing this right? Where do I put my hands? Oh God, did I brush my teeth for long enough?!

I focused on all those moments but had this bad habit of overlooking things like graduating high school on the honor roll, even though I was sick in bed nearly half the time. I didn’t see the part where I graduated college, and later aced grad school, when high school teachers told me there was no way that would ever happen.

I’d ignore the fact that I overcame the illness despite doctors saying I never would. (Want to have a good time? Join a pain management support group at age fifteen and be the youngest person there by thirty-plus years. Enjoy as everyone stares at you with rage-inducing pity in their eyes and try not to shrivel up and die on the spot as they say things like “Oh no, you’re too young to live like this!” and “It’s not fair. You should be allowed to have a life.” Fun. Fucking. Times.)

Instead of focusing on all the times I had defied the odds, I spent years looking at the things I thought I couldn’t do. I was unqualified, not smart enough, not strong enough. Two decades spent repeating the narrative that I was incapable of taking care of myself. Believing, at my core, that I wasn’t competent. 

I didn’t just internalize that shit. I ate it like Wheaties for breakfast every morning, then ran a play-by-play of ineptitude every night as I fell asleep. Impostor syndrome is real, folks. And it sucks. 

Then, somewhere around 2010 I had a realization that shifted my perspective: no one else had a clue what they were doing either.

I didn’t want to live a life shackled to my insecurities. So I did the rational, reasonable, responsible thing. I packed all my shit into a suitcase and moved to Hawaii. A few years later, I started a business. Now I get to help other people like me—quiet rebels with loud ideas.

It wasn’t all Mai Tais on the beach from there on (though I’m happy to report there have been plenty of those, too). I absolutely backslid at times. There were stretches where I wandered waaaay too far down the wrong paths and then had to figure out how to start over. There were lots, and lots, and lots of failures. And thank god for it.

In keeping with the contradictory nature of all the best life lessons, failure led to ever deeper levels of trust in myself. When I realized I had made a wrong turn, I’d crinkle my nose the way you do when you’re sniffing out what’s gone bad in the fridge and think, “Okay, Schenk. How the hell are we gonna get outta this one?” And then, I’d trust.

Early on I didn’t actually know that’s what I was doing. I felt like I was just stumbling forward because what other choice did I have? I did have another choice, though. I could have stopped stumbling, sat my ass down, and refused to move. I could have accepted the latest failure as the end of the road and resigned myself to live a life smaller than the one I wanted.

That’s the kicker about choices. You always have one.

I’m happy I made the better choice. That’s why Valentine’s Day is my favorite day. It’s a celebration of the lengths I am capable of going to love myself, to trust myself, and to kick some ass. In the words of one of my favorites, Jen Sincero: “In order to kick ass, you must first lift your foot.”

Consider, dear Valentine, how can you trust yourself a little more today? Tomorrow? For the rest of your life?

Are you hell-bent for glory and ready to pull on your ass-kicking pants?

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Angela SchenkComment