Think negatively as a form of self-love.

How to allow yourself not to be okay without being a wreck.

Somewhere in Roblox, everyone asks me why I focus on negative thinking when I create content about spiritual and personal development. Well, everyone focuses on positive thinking, but who focuses on the negative? After all, it prevails in life, and in my experience, trying to control and use it is much more effective.

“Feeling down? Go for a run.”

I remember exactly how I felt as a teenager. I felt terrible, I hated myself, and I couldn't see a way out. I cut my arm, and every time I looked down from a bridge or from a ledge while washing windows onto the sidewalk, I wondered if it would kill me and if I should try it. I didn't go to a psychologist; I had no one to confide in. And when I did, I got advice.

• “You mustn't think like that.” - About not wanting to be in this world and every breath physically hurting me? How do you do that?

• “You have to do something so you don't think about it so much.” - In reality, when you're depressed, you feel like you have no energy, like you've been run over by a steamroller. What exactly is a person supposed to do in that state?

• “There are people in the world who have it much worse.” - How exactly is someone else's suffering supposed to help me, dude?

You feel like shit and someone starts shining a flashlight on you. They say we should “look for the good,” “think positively,” and when you're really burning up, at least “breathe deeply and gratefully.” It's fascinating how positive people are so afraid of negative thoughts. They try to stomp them into the ground, extinguish them, pretend they don't exist because they can't control them. When they admit to one, they start to pile up and then it can drown them if they don't break it again...

Over the past ten years, I've come to the conclusion that this is not my path. I don't want quick fixes. I want lasting solutions. And in the long run, it doesn't make sense to ignore something, because if it exists, it won't cease to exist just because you ignore it. On the contrary, without your attention and correction, it can grow to monstrous proportions.

What if self-love is something completely different from an Epsom salt bath and a pink diary with gold lettering that says “I Am Enough”?

What if self-love also means the ability to say: Not today. Today it hurts. And I'm giving it space.

This article is an ode to negative thinking. Not the kind that drives you into a spiral of self-loathing, but the raw, truthful, deeply human “this just sucks,” which, paradoxically, can be much more healing than a thousand affirmations…