“You have to love yourself before loving another person.” By R.M. Drake
Honestly never knew how real that quote was till this year. Like damn, “that shit hits hard”. If you are in a tough spot concerning self-love, then (hopefully) my series of self-love articles will help you.
I, well, my breakup decided that I have to go through this self-love journey. You don’t realize how important self-love is till you’re in a situation where if you had it things would’ve gone so much better. Whether that situation is finding confidence for a job interview, learning when to step out of a toxic relationship, or allowing yourself to be yourself in public. Self-love is extremely difficult nowadays with social media, gender expectations, personal mental blocks, all these walls that have been built by either yourself or society makes it so hard to realize how fucking dope you are.
I’m not writing this AFTER my self-love journey. I’m actually pretty close to step two on my self-love journey, so clearly, I’m a professional. The reason why I decided to write this during my self-love journey is that I wished I had somebody on this journey with me, you know? Somebody that understood me or at least knows what it’s like to never truly love yourself. So hopefully these articles about self-love will make you feel less lonely during your process too.
A lot of our anxiety, fears, anger, sadness, trauma, so many components pushes us even further from self-love. It is fucking sucks that emotions work like this and outside interference (social media, etc.) doesn’t help either. The thing is, the process isn’t smooth sailing because life doesn’t pause. Sometimes you’ll be so close to step two but then shit happens and you’re back to the beginning. There are moments where you’ll feel shitty, unmotivated, and get that wave of sadness but don’t let it stop you. Each time you get knocked down the moment you get back up gets better and better (trust)!
The process is not a short one, which was the hardest pill to swallow, for me. The journey to self-love can take days, months, years, you could be fifty-years-old and still on the journey. So, we’ll just take some baby steps!
The first thing my therapist told me is, everything you do for yourself has a little bit of self-love in it. Whether that’s applying for an internship, putting lip balm, making coffee in the morning, everything you do for YOURSELF always has a bit of self-love in it. We all gotta start somewhere so let’s start with appreciating ourselves for doing the little things for ourselves!