Love looks like crying to Pitbull

What four years of therapy, a car cry, and Pitbull taught me about self-love.

I’ve been in therapy for almost four years — which means I almost have a Bachelor’s degree in therapy attendance. That sounds alarming when written out like that, but it’s just how it worked out.

I originally went to therapy after I had been working in direct programming for homeless youth in Detroit during COVID. After finding myself in chronic stress, I needed a better way to exist instead of compulsively washing my hands until they bled. This type of therapy is straightforward: problem, tools, practice. We processed little stresses and she told me I was doing great.

This was convenient timing for when I needed big league therapy going through a marital separation, divorce, unemployment, new job, and big move.

We processed big stresses and she told me I was doing great. Many times in that kind of therapy my therapist then also functioned as a makeshift friend and one of the only constants in a season with little constant.

I then graduated from that kind of therapy to technical, intentional Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Except this time we could actually focus on the heart of it all — the things that shaped the way my brain thinks. This kind of therapy feels like Olympic weight training in contrast to the recreational league therapy I was doing before. It was all important, it’s just now it’s time to train.

And with all the therapy I have done I am essentially a mental health pro-athlete and I take my training seriously. I am regimented. I am disciplined. I am committed to being as functionally crazy as possible. I am also committed to not using the word “crazy” in seriousness but only for dramatic emphasis. This is my contribution to community good.

Every Monday morning I sit in a familiar virtual waiting room while my reflection is mirrored back at me with my messy bun, glasses, and quickly-turning-cold-coffee. I do my therapy sessions virtually still because I am the kind of person that likes to cry in the privacy of my home. This does mean that I have no clue how tall my therapists are which is slightly unnerving but I have decided to move forward in blind trust.

We do our reps of mental health tools as I talk, she listens, and then she intermittently drops crazy perspective questions that sit with me all week. If therapy is training, this is the no bullshit kind. Our sessions are occasionally followed with emails throughout the week of resources if needed. My email subject lines are things like “Normal Things That Made Me Feel Like Garbage Today” or “Long update but connected to everything!” Just like a physical coach, my therapist keeps me on plan, except instead of swatting donuts out of my hand and yelling for ten more reps, she sends me articles with titles like “Romantic Love vs. Drug Addiction May Inspire a New Treatment for Addiction.”

Our training is overall helping me become a healthier version of myself. Except for the kind of days when you have to drop a thousand dollars on new tires and you get another writing rejection and the air feels too heavy from heat. The type of day where you find yourself teary from your tire purchase and generalized bad day and you have to turn on Pitbull and Ne-Yo’s “Time of Our Lives” to emotionally recover by the time you get to work (this is an almost full proof method to end unwanted crying).

So I decided to give myself a little break. I’ve been doing so great! Time to let myself be a little insane for the day! I decided to reward myself with a little emotional cheat day. A little treat for working so hard! A reprieve from all the hard training I’ve been doing to just loosen up and put my hair down!

It was time for a classic self-hate spiral — let’s go girls! Instead of reframing and challenging the unkind and harsh thoughts I direct towards myself, I decided to not try at all, the adult version of a toddler meltdown. I am going to cry to “Time of Our Lives.” Sorry, Pitbull.

I just wanted to have a bad day the old fashion way, the way before I knew how to have a bad day better. So I did. Because I’m adult! Free will!

But having a cheat day when it comes to therapy leaves me with a stomachache from overindulgence. The old way feels like garbage when you have a new way. It feels comforting at first, because it’s familiar. But my old way of handling stress is to lean into being hyper critical and spiraling into very elaborate and hurtful narratives of fiction that I like to make up about myself. The old way didn’t work back then, why would it work now?

And I have a lot of compassion for why I had the old way. It was built from the experiences I had with the tools I had. Yadayada. But self-compassion is a muscle I have intentionally trained after insecurity and not-so-kindness ran the show for so long. That training took work, and time, and trial and error: I am not wasting it.

I’m not sure what repeat of “Time of Our Lives” it was when my training clicked in and I thought about all the therapy sessions where we talked about self-dialogue and how somewhere in me is the kid in me. And what am I doing talking this way to the kid in me? Am I bullying a little kid? That’s messed up.

I know too much about how to have a better bad day than to do the old way of having a bad day — I have trained for this. There are guaranteed days ahead where everything feels insurmountable. But what I don’t have to do is lean into a bad day with any kind of pile-on of self-hate. I want to talk kindly to myself, and be on my own team. I want to let myself cry to Pitbull and not be crying because of any internal bullying. I’m not doing it.

And so after four years of therapy and hard mental health training, I made my phone background a familiar face: six year old me. It’s a photo of me in a dance recital costume as a hummingbird with big red feathers. Bright, bold, loud. If I’m going to have a bad day that’s fine, but it can’t come at the expense of saying unkind things to that girl in me. And every time I pick up my phone throughout the day, I am accountable to what I have to say to her too.

I have trained too hard to not love her.