It was only a few months ago that I really began to understand what it means to love myself. I had been searching for this feeling of self-worth and happiness described in the pages of Teen Vogue and Cosmopolitan for so long. Yet even today, I am still not 100 percent there. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it. The truth is, I found love for myself not in the feelings of joy and dignity, but in the feelings of complete and utter pain and self-loathing. Now let me explain what I mean.
I think the cookie-cutter explanation for self-love is often described as an understanding of your own worth and feeling comfortable in your own skin. Simple enough, right? Well, what they don’t advertise are the revelations that come when you are at your lowest point. The times when you look in the mirror and see a completely broken person staring back at you. The times where you are questioning your purpose or the reasons why you do what you do. Does it even really matter? The answer is yes. Yes, it does.
For the longest time, I would catch myself going back on my own advice and trying to please the people around me. I craved their validation for everything I did. It got to the point where I was a hype man with hype for everybody else but myself—what an ironic way to live. Despite this, I did make it out of that mindset. I started to understand that the only way I was going to love myself was to let myself feel everything. Both the good and the bad, not just focusing on the things that were good.
I stopped wearing makeup to show off my acne scars. I stopped wearing concealer to cover up my dark circles and undereye bags. I left my naturally frizzy hair alone. I stopped trying to dress up for my friends. I started to reframe my thoughts and really thought about the reasons why I did what I did. Was it to impress the people around me or did I genuinely want to do these things? I was trying to figure that out for myself.
Some people might argue that from the description above, I was letting myself go. That I was just depressed and that I needed to dress myself up for the sole purpose of making myself feel better. That is all wrong. What I really was attempting to do was to separate all of those superficial things from inner myself. To really get to know myself I had to stop hiding the me who I went to bed with, the me that would continue to be there even when all the temporary things were washed away.
I was terrified it would all be for nothing and that I would be disappointed with the Danielle that was there. The one that I had come to know for the past 19 years. Thankfully I was wrong. It took a bit of time and belief in myself, but I eventually got there. When I looked in the mirror, I finally realized I was all I had. That through all of the hurdles and good times I was there the whole time. I was the sole person who got me through all of the self-doubt.
At that moment I finally understood what it meant to love myself. The uncut, raw, bitter truth of it all was that I had to start thinking for myself, by myself and to myself that I was more than enough. Not because I was selfish or because I didn’t care about other people’s opinions anymore, but because I knew it was the only way I was going to truly be permanently content and be able to live a life of complete happiness going forward.
Everybody has their own journey to self-love and not every experience looks the same. The sooner you start putting yourself first, the better you will feel in the long run. Trust me, when you actually start to feel this way, others will start to notice too.
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