Everyone has their own placeholder for a lack. For me it was books that I ate. Knowledge that I devoured. Diaries which I wrote to the full.

No matter if eating, knowledge, playing, buying, smoking, climbing, travelling, running or meditating. Everything is compensation, if it should serve a lack. If something is not made out of inspiration and joy, if it is not born from within, but an adaptation to what one mistakenly believes to be, become or have to be, everything remains an attempt to pretend self-love.

One feels self-love when one carries a full beverage tray and serves the guests in the inn, not spilling a drop, pushing oneself through the narrow rows of chairs and exhausting oneself joyfully, because one did not pay attention to whether the beverages sloshed over the edges. Which they didn't do either. But when I meticulously begin to take care that nothing goes wrong, that I don't make any mistakes, then it goes wrong, I stumble, smash the dishes and turn my heart into a murder pit.

I feel self-love when I dance to music in a full club where hundreds of others could watch me, but where I am not interested in their eyes but in becoming one with the music, in spontaneously surrendering to the rhythms. My heart is turned to the music that guides my body. But if I am anxious to look good, if I am aware of the many eyes that watch my dance and judge me, then every pair of eyes that I encounter is like a thread that pulls on my limbs and my movements become clumsy.