On Self-Improvement:

Clean your messes while cataloguing them.
We’re ingrained to find the hidden picture in our own floods of spilled milk before 
moping up the evidence of tumult.
To remember and embrace our flaws is to recognize our origins of growth:
the points from which we leap with opened arms, flailing, praying for some new degree of
self-discovery to break our fall.

Each picture, caption, this very poem — relics, 
immortalizing our current reality for the sole purpose of perpetual self-assessment. 
We codify our anxieties, hopes, dreams, and reckonings with the divine 
to preserve our current moment while hallmarking periods for 
(inevitable) 
future psychological growth. 

In a world obsessed simultaneously with mindfulness
– the beauty of the precious, fleeting present –
but also personal evolution and growth,
our own narrative has become competitive.
The first to outgrow past trauma wins.
Who remembers more about our first date.
Phones down, but why didn’t you pick up?

The infatuation with transformation in a world so focused on savoring the present moment
is not only contradictory but performative.
Does loving myself impede change and therefore my own self-worth?
In adoring my problems and insecurities and vulnerabilities,
these tiny anthills which I must be loved both around but also for,
do I resist my own growth?

Or is such a transformative perspective to self-love not only taxing but grasping at the intangible notion of the future, better, more evolved self who may never materialize?

To love myself unabashedly is both an act of bravery and stagnation. 

We are the paradox of mourning the girl we used to be 
but praying to God that we never see her again.