How To Stay With Yourself When Everything Feels Uncertain

The moments in my life when I have felt like I actually might love myself were not comfortable moments.

Sure, lighting a cozy candle, journaling, exercising, and other self-care activities can be considered self-love. And yes, when I do these things, I feel substantially better.

But have you ever noticed how we can begin to confuse self-love with self-fixing?

How suddenly doing tasks that are meant to bring you joy and make you feel good turn into chores or just another variation of a way to be hard on yourself or make you feel like you should be doing more to BE more?

I think to myself: “When did I stop seeing self-help as an invitation and replace it as a means to fix my brokenness?”

I know I am not alone in feeling this way, and at the same time, it feels vulnerable to share. But then again, most human things do require great vulnerability.

There is a link between the degree to which we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and our capacity to stay with ourselves during times of discomfort.

I believe this is one of the greatest ways we can show love for ourselves.

Let me explain:

It’s easy to stay with yourself when things are going smoothly. It’s easy to stay connected to your own energy when everything feels like it’s in harmony or when nothing feels chaotic outside of yourself.

But how often do you feel this way?

Probably not very often.

And it’s not because you are doing something wrong, not trying hard enough or living good enough. But because when we place the love we have for ourselves in the hands of our environment, circumstances, or solely within the arms of another… it will always feel fleeting and conditional.

We start to unintentionally and subconsciously bargain with ourselves, saying things like:

• “I’ll love myself when I feel more settled.”

• “I’ll be kinder to myself once I get through this self-help book.”

• “I’ll be more loveable once I’m no longer broken.”

• “I’ll be more worthy of giving myself love once everything around me is in alignment again.”

Essentially, we are treating love for ourselves as something to be earned rather than an invitation to be met and something to witness. And I think the only way we can really begin to witness ourselves is by choosing to see our humanness from a place of curiosity and reverence rather than from a place of fear and contempt.

And you might be thinking, “Well, don’t self-help books and other self-help tools help me to be able to do that?”.

The key word is help.

It didn’t give you love for yourself. It shined a light on what was already there and it could absolutely help you access that part of yourself ina. way that feels more authentic and true for YOU. But nothing outside of yourself is gatekeeping your love, your power, or your personal liberation.

And I think this is such a powerful distinction because it bring you back to yourself and to one of the most fundamental truths of your human existence:

Everything Exists Here.

All of it. The love, the pain, the suffering, the joy, the hardship, the ache, the happiness.

And all of these parts of you are deeply worthy of your love and grace.

I don’t think sitting in the discomfort for the difficult parts gets easier. But I do think it becomes less agonizing when we begin to recognize that there is no shame in our humanness. That we can approach self-help and self-love as a way to return to ourselves, rather than as a way to erase the deepest and truest parts of our very existence.

So, how do we stay with ourselves when it’s hard?

Lately, it’s been hard to stay with myself.

With all the change, old patterns have crept in quietly—fears I thought I’d outgrown, tenderness I forgot how to hold.
It’s easy to drift away from yourself when your nervous system is buzzing and the ground underneath feels like it’s constantly moving.

But I’m learning—again and again—that staying doesn’t mean always knowing what to do.
It means choosing to return.
Choosing not to abandon yourself, even when the old scripts tell you to run.

Ways to remind yourself how to stay, even when it’s hard:

• Sitting with the ache and not forcing myself to figure out why it aches (hint: to ache is to be human).

• Breathing into the tightness instead of bracing against it.

• Naming what’s true, even when it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy.

• Loosening the grip on needing to feel ‘better’ and softening into just feeling.

• Turning toward the part of me I usually hide and saying, “You’re allowed to be here.”

• Letting silence be a form of care.

• Reminding myself that the goal isn’t perfection—it’s presence.

Staying with yourself isn’t about always feeling grounded.

It’s about learning how to come back when you’ve drifted. Learning how to return to yourself even when it feels like the hardest thing in the world. Even when it would be easier to continue to run or forge an easier path that didn’t require you to lean into the complexity of what it means to be human.

Over and over and over.

I think this is one of the most beautiful ways we can love ourselves.

Not because everything is easy or perfectly polished. Not because some days don’t feel hard when old wounds creep back to the surface. Not because we won’t inevetibaly stumble or fall or bruise ourselves along the way. Not because it always makes sense.

But because more than anything, we need ourselves during those moments. To remember that the home within yourself is always a space where you are welcome. Where the door is always open no matter how far off the beaten path you wander.

I hope you give yourself permission to return to yourself often. To know that it was perhaps never about how perfectly you stayed but that you gave yourself permission to return as often as you needed.

With love,

Bethany