On Your Own

On Your Own is a 2021 anthology published by Aspiring Pens, gathering seventeen independent writers under a title that holds two meanings at once: the loneliness of being left without support, and the quiet power of discovering that you are enough company for yourself. The book launches its Self Love Series with a collection that refuses to make self-love easy or pretty;` the writers here are honest about the fact that loving yourself after years of shrinking, comparing, and handing your worth over to others is one of the hardest things a person can do. Several chapters open with the places where self-abandonment begins: a girl who spent her childhood reshaping herself to please a mother, a father, a friend, a crush; a young woman who fought her grief and guilt over her parents' death for two years before a stranger helped her understand it wasn't her fault; a writer who survived a dark period by writing poems as though they were medicine. The forms are as varied as the voices; tight lyric poems that say everything in four lines, extended personal essays exploring self-worth through philosophy and faith, short fiction about bullied girls learning to stand up for themselves, prose meditations on body acceptance, and affirmations written directly to the self in the second person. Nature recurs as a grounding presence throughout: the moon that teaches by going dark, the ocean that absorbs everything, the caterpillar that must dissolve entirely before becoming what it was always meant to be. Faith, particularly Islamic spirituality, surfaces in several chapters as a foundation for self-love rather than a replacement for it, with writers finding in their trust in God the permission to also trust themselves. The book closes with a series of aphorisms and compressed verse that distill everything the longer chapters have built: that you must become your own sun, your own home, your own first love. On Your Own does not promise that self-love arrives fully formed; it insists, chapter by chapter, that it is built slowly, imperfectly, and always, ultimately, by you.