Self-Love: A Process by Ryan Hoover
Self-Love: A Process is a collection of poetry about one person's process of learning how to love and care for themselves. The 9 poems document my own experience moving from clinical depression to fully realized self-love over a year and a half period. I believe we're often told to practice self-love & self-care without being told two crucial things: what those concepts CAN look like in practice and how they vary for each person. For me, writing poetry and using it to work through my complex thoughts and emotions—along with lots of therapy and exercise—was the process that brought me to a state of self-love. My hope is that this collection shows readers one possible route they can take—one route among many—to go and find what they need to love themselves.