Aida Takyrbasheva
Self Love
Poems
Poetry for the long way home to yourself.
Self love is not a mood. It is a habit of not abandoning yourself.
Most writing about self love arrives as instruction: affirm this, believe that, be kinder. Poems work differently. They do not tell you to love yourself; they let you overhear someone treating a life — an ordinary, unfinished, still-becoming life — with tenderness, until the same tone becomes available to you.
These are reflections and self love poems on self-trust, self-worth and becoming, drawn from the same ground as Everything Is Fleeting.
Four poems for self-trust
Permission
You keep waiting
for someone qualified
to tell you it is allowed —
the leaving, the wanting,
the softer life.
No one is coming with the form.
Sign it yourself.
Inventory
Count what you survived
with the same care
you count what you lack.
Notice how the list changes
when you are honest
about who carried you here.
The Body Was Never the Problem
It kept breathing
through every year
you spoke to it unkindly.
Loyalty like that
deserves a softer voice.
Becoming
You are not late.
You are early
to a version of yourself
that has not finished arriving.
Wait kindly.
How to read poems about self love
Read one, not ten. Self love is built in small returns. A single poem, reread across a week, does more than a scroll of many.
Read aloud, in your own voice. Hearing kindness in your voice, addressed to you, is a different experience than reading it silently.
Keep the line that argues with you. The line you resist usually marks the place where self-trust is still under construction.
Let it be undramatic. Most self love looks like sleeping, eating, saying no, and going back to the work you actually care about.
Self love and impermanence
Everything is fleeting — including the version of yourself you are currently ashamed of. Self-trust is easier when you stop treating your present self as a permanent verdict and start treating it as weather: real, passing, worth dressing for.
Be gentle with what is still becoming.
The book
Everything Is Fleeting
A collection on love, grief, presence, impermanence and self-trust — part prayer, part love letter, part companion for the journey home to yourself.
Written by Aida Takyrbasheva, Kyrgyz-American poet and author. Also read poems for grief and letting go.