When you just can’t love yourself, just work on giving yourself basic respect.
When you just can’t practice self care, aim for basic hygiene and keeping yourself alive.
When you just can’t have positive thoughts, focus on ignoring the negative ones.
When you just can’t quit those bad habits and unhealthy coping mechanisms, be sure to take care of yourself afterwards.
When you just can’t make yourself eat enough, aim for something three times a day, even if it’s something small.
When you just can’t stop binge eating, just do your best to forgive yourself and focus on something else instead of dwelling on it for any longer.
Not everyone is at a point where they can recover, and so thinking about recovery can be intimidating and make them shut down, because they just feel like they’re nowhere close to getting better so they might as well not bother. There needs to be more advice on dragging yourself through the days. Self care to the bare minimum. Aiming for “feeling okay with yourself” or “feeling less awful about yourself” rather than loving yourself. Baby steps.
The SINGLE most valuable thing I acquired from my undergrad degree was internalising this: something is better than nothing.
‘Perfect’ is the enemy of ‘good’. ‘Good ‘is often the enemy of ‘done’. Best practices are almost always the enemy of better practices.
I have spent a lot of time in my professional life – in several different fields, actually – trying to convince people to do something. Because something is always better than nothing. Even if it’s a very, very small something. It’s still better.