” You owe yourself the love that you so freely give to other people. ”
Hi my lovelies! Happy Monday and happy Valentine’s Day week! As we go into this week, I’ve had a lot of conflicting thoughts and while I will probably do some posts on dating and love and such, I thought that this is the number one topic that resonated with me. When we talk about Valentine’s Day, it’s easy to just think about couples, and significant others, and that part of love; I think we more easily forget the self love aspect, family love, friend love, etc. There’s so many areas in our life that we can apply this concept, other than just with significant others. Today, I want to talk a little about self love because this is something I struggle with, as many do.
I think the hardest part about this topic is comparison. The point of this blog post is not to bash social media or anything like that, because I love it as much as anyone, but it has brought us into this new generation where we scroll past hundreds of photos, every single day, of other people, and the ability to compare ourselves to these other people are prevalent. I’m guilty of waking up and immediately checking Instagram to see how many new followers I have or how many likes I’ve gotten on a picture. I immediately scroll past hundreds of gorgeous women and do the same thing throughout the day and every night. I’m only human, and can’t help to think sometimes “wow, how come I don’t have that” or “how come I don’t look like that” or “I need to lose weight” or “I should be doing my hair like this or looking like that.” It’s so simple to see other people and compare ourselves to them.
Here’s the thing, as much as you are doing this to someone else, they may be doing this to you. I find myself more and more trying so hard to make my life seem perfect over social media and even in person. I’m the type of person that loves to laugh and thrives off of love from my friends. I hate being alone and being with family and friends is when I’m at my highest. When I’m by myself, not so much. That’s where this post comes in.
Self love is a tricky thing. I think that when I used to hear the word “self love,” I thought “oh yeah that’s cool, I mean I like myself I guess.” I felt like it was this weird, obscure thing that meant spending lots of money on yourself, like getting your nails done and your hair done and going to a spa and things like that. And yes, I will never turn those things down, and while I feel like that is part of it, there is so much more to it than that.
One of the biggest things I’ve changed about my life is how I look at love. Self love, family love, friend love, relationship love, pretty much everything. I went to an awesome church service last night where we talked about love. How people always love the idea of love and love to be in love but how that is so different than choosing love, even when it’s difficult. This was one of the best messages I’ve ever heard: choose love. So simple, so seemingly easy, so basic… but the truth is, it is so much harder than that.
Choosing love every single day is hard. Especially choosing love for yourself. I am someone that will do everything I possibly can for other people, even at the expense of myself. I also don’t take care of myself the way I should. For example, I’ve had back problems forever but just ignored it and convinced myself that if I ignored it, it would get better.. yeah, that didn’t work so well, now I’m in PT and it’s so much worse than it ever needed to be. My point of this is, we have to choose to love ourselves every single day. Maybe not waking up and scrolling on Instagram first thing, or realizing that you need to take a personal day, or convincing yourself to try new things on your own, maybe these are small things that we can implement to try to give ourselves more love. Remembering that social media is a highlight reel of the best moments of peoples’ lives and counting your own blessings to not compare yourself to others is another easy, simple, effective thing we can all do. Even something as simple as remembering to drink enough water every day and nourishing yourself with good food can be simple acts to self love.
Self love has become a huge thing for me. A year ago, I was not in love with myself at all. I was working two jobs, going to school full-time, had an internship, and was in an unhealthy relationship that gave me no time to care about myself at all. I didn’t care, I was just trying to get through each day. I made this fake persona where others thought that I was super happy all the time, tried to show up to every event with a smile on my face, convinced all my followers that I was happy, and I think I even started to convince myself of this “fake happiness” that I had created for myself. Now, I know what real happiness is; however, I also understand that self love does not equal pure happiness. Self love is realizing what you are going through and recognizing it and feeling it and doing what you can to improve yourself. Some days I wake up in a funk, and that’s okay, we all have those days, but now I know what I need to do to get myself back on track. Whether it’s reading some bible verses, or taking a warm bath, or writing a blog post, tidying up my room, etc, there’s so many little, simple things that make me happy and make me feel like I’m taking care of me.
We all need to find these little things that can make us feel good about ourselves and implement them into our every day routines. This is something that will always take modifications as to how you’re feeling, but I truly believe that taking care of yourself by doing these things will help to further your happiness. I’ve been doing this for the past few months and it really has created a much better day-to-day for me. I wake up feeling more refreshed and go to bed feeling happy with myself. I am finally convincing myself to go do more things by myself and really enjoy the person that I am. I honestly believe that you can’t love someone else until you love yourself and although it’s going to be an ever-changing journey to self love and there is so much that goes into it, taking the first, easy steps towards it, can make a world of difference in your everyday life.
” More Self Love, Babygirl.”
MAYA KEIKO LIVESAY 