Last year I wrote an article about Laughing at Yourself, which was about why I decided to stop being self-deprecating for the Lenten season. In the article, I spoke about how I’ve always been quite harsh on myself, and how I decided to challenge myself to look in from a more positive viewpoint. For Lent this year, my focus was on self-love, and giving myself compliments every day.
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I’ve always struggled with being kind to myself, with self-love and self-care. I would encourage my friends and family to remember how wonderful they are and to take time for themselves for self-care, but I brushed it off when it came to me. I think part of it is because I felt like I never deserved it, which is sad but it’s true. I didn’t think, and sometimes I still don’t think, I’m worthy of love and appreciation from others and from myself. Throughout the years I’ve learned that as a human being, I deserve some modicum of respect from other people; every decent human being deserves to be treated with respect and kindness. Loving me and caring about me is up to them, if they decide to do so, then wonderful, but if not, then that’s also fine: I can’t determine my worth from how many people love me or how many people want me in their life. I’ve always known that I should never depend on others to determine the person I am.
But I’ve never been kind to myself until this school year. So much has happened this year and I’ve challenged myself and been challenged by my academic life, my work life, and my social life to look at myself and to acknowledge my worth. As an RA, I’ve learned that I need to give myself the grace to make mistakes and acknowledge that making mistakes is not my end all be all of how “good” I am. As a double major, I’ve realized that I am smart, I do know what I’m talking about when I speak and that I should be proud of the work I put out and the ways I’ve challenged myself academically. My friends have been integral to challenging me to love myself, they never fail to scold me when I say something particularly mean about myself or to remind me that I deserve a break and time to myself as well. But most of all, this school year, I’ve learned how to love myself and why it’s so important to get to the point where I can say that loving myself is important and necessary for me to be genuinely happy.
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The picture shown above is somewhat deceiving because sometimes people don’t understand how difficult it is to “choose joy,” to choose happiness. It’s strange because everyone assumes that everyone just wants to be happy and that’s true, people want to be happy, they want to choose joy. But there are some people who feel like they can’t be happy, they can’t choose joy, or worse, they don’t deserve happiness and joy. If you‘re reading this and you feel like you don’t deserve that joy and that happiness, please remember that you do. I know it’s hard, it’s taken me 20 years to realize that and I’m still struggling with it and I’m still mean to myself every once in awhile. But once you start being kind to yourself, it makes a massive difference in your attitude.
For Lent, I decided to say one compliment to myself every day and before Lent started I had already done different things to improve how I treated myself. Since the beginning of 2018, I started a consistent skin care routine and that made me feel better about myself because I’ve always been self-conscious about my skin and the acne scars that I have because puberty and the “bad genes” suck and really kicked my butt from 8th grade to junior year of high school. The skin routine took care of my physical self-care, taking the time every day to do something just for myself and to help with the way I looked at myself made me feel more confident.
I also started to change the way I looked at my day, instead of waking up and thinking about everything I needed to do for that day, I would think about things that made me happy and wake up thinking that the day was going to be a good day. I was skeptical when I first started and I didn’t think it would do anything, but I did start waking up and not automatically dreading what I would have to do. I didn’t feel as stressed and if I was stressed, I would still be taking it all in stride because I was confident in my abilities that I would get whatever I needed and whatever anyone else needed from me done.
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Throughout Lent, I struggled with finding something good to say to myself everyday which really shouldn’t have been that difficult, but it was and that forced me to really look at how I’ve been treating myself. As the days went on I woke up happier and I felt at peace with myself, I didn’t feel the compulsive need to put myself down whenever I could. I could see and feel my confidence rising and I was proud of myself because I was finally starting to love myself completely and that was amazing.
Questioning yourself is a difficult but important part of loving yourself because you get to evaluate who you are and what you’ve been doing to yourself. You have the opportunity to ask “am I happy?” and honestly answer it without any judgment. I kept asking myself that question throughout these past few months and I realized that there were some aspects of my life where I was “happy” because I was making other important people in my life happy. But when I asked myself again, I realized I wasn’t happy with doing that, I was just trying to be happy because I wanted to make people happy, I felt obligated to keep doing what I was doing just to make other people happy.
Then I had to ask myself what changes I needed to make in my life to make sure I was making myself happy and I came to some really difficult conclusions. But I knew I owed it to myself to make a decision, regardless of how difficult it is, so I could be happy for myself. Making those decisions can be stressful and it made me feel like a terrible, selfish person. But I also knew if I was to stay in the situation I was in, it would be unhealthy for me and that isn’t fair to me either. It’s okay to be selfish and to make decisions to be happy, genuinely happy. Obviously don’t start hurting people to make yourself happy, but if you have to cut ties with someone because continuing that relationship or friendship would be unhealthy, then for your sake, please do. Don’t feel obligated to do something to make other people happy if you know that it doesn’t make you happy, never sacrifice yourself and your happiness for the sake of others. Being selfless is one thing, but giving yourself up, giving up who you are is completely different.
Loving yourself can be a difficult process and I’m still working on it, love doesn’t happen overnight. But you can start to love yourself by being truthful with yourself and making the changes you need to in order to live a happy and healthy life, in order to adopt a positive image of yourself. You all deserve happiness, never forget that. But more than that, you all deserve the opportunity to make decisions for your own happiness, you all deserve love from the most important person: yourself.