Well! Well! It is that time of the year when everything around you smells of flowers and blueberry cheesecake (at least, for me, it does!). The time when you dream about roses, candlelight dinners and a special someone. Yep, you are right, it is Valentine’s Day.
A few years back, I would hate the month of February because of two main reasons—the first being that our annual exams would take place throughout the month and the second being the 14th of February. You step out of the house and see advertisements of Cadbury and others with couples kissing in them all the time. The creative and innovative captions connecting love with chocolate would make me wonder why I couldn’t ever get the pleasure of actually feeling the warmth and the joy of this particular day. In other words, I have always felt that having another person is very important in order to cherish such celebrations. When everyone around me would have dates to look forward to, I would wonder why my life couldn’t magically turn into something golden, just like theirs.
What does Valentine’s Day really mean? Is it just about being lovey-dovey with your partner or is it about sitting in your bed and wiping your tears because you don’t have one? While trying to answer that question over the past few years alongside dealing with some memorable, yet unpleasant relations, I have discovered that this day can be a celebration of who I am as a person and the love that I share with my own self. Why is it that we always need someone else to express our inner feelings and emotions? Can we not direct the same towards ourselves?
This Valentine’s Day, let’s try and be our own valentine by pampering ourselves with all the love and care that we deserve. With the regular hustle and bustle in our lives and assignments all over the place, we hardly get time to even look at ourselves in the mirror. Do you even remember the last time you have had a chat with yourself? Well, I definitely don’t… It is very easy to say that I love myself, but do any of us even know what it truly means to love ourselves? Trust me, it’s easier said than done. Satisfying yourself can, at times, be harder than satisfying someone else. That is because, unconsciously, we all keep a lot of expectations from ourselves which we cannot always meet. We constantly lose hope and faith in ourselves. However, if we ever achieve something that we desired, we hardly take the opportunity to appreciate ourselves. We might receive acknowledgement from our near and dear ones, but do we ever congratulate ourselves? That’s something to think about, right?
I have seen so many award winning actors going up on the stage to give a speech about how grateful they are to multiple people for that particular award. But I have never heard anyone say how proud they are of themself to have actually been able to conquer such a huge milestone in their life. If we think about it, it is tough to actually bring ourselves into the limelight, but it is something that we are very much capable of doing. So, this Valentine’s Day, let’s save the date for a day filled with us empowering our inner selves.
May the love you have for yourself bloom throughout the year!