Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to only celebrate love in relationships. We can celebrate love in every aspect of life, including the love we have for ourselves. That love is the most important of all, and we must appreciate who we are every single day. One way to do this is by writing letters to all the different versions of yourself: the past, present and future you. Every version of you deserves all the love you can give.
Grab a journal, a notebook or your laptop, and let’s get to reflecting. Remember who you were as a child and a teenager, and write it down. Think about what you absolutely loved and hated back then. It’s OK to still feel sadness if you have bad memories, and that is why it’s so important to take care of our past selves and acknowledge them. I’m not saying to dwell on the past, but you can take some time to appreciate that little girl and everything she did to get to where you are now. We tend to forget to be compassionate to ourselves and criticize past decisions or actions. We give a lot of our kindness to other people, and it is easy to forget about ourselves. Handle your past self with grace because they were doing the best they could.
Now, you should write to yourself in this very moment. What are you doing with your life right now? Think about what is making you happy currently and what is not. What’s interesting to you during this time of your life? Appreciate yourself for all that you’re doing every single day. College is difficult, and we are faced with a TON of different kinds of challenges. You can write as yourself or to yourself—whatever feels the most natural to you. Be kind to who you are right now, because you’re amazing in more ways than you’ll ever realize.
Lastly, it’s time for the future you! We don’t know exactly where we’ll be in the future, so you can always ask yourself questions about how things are going. You know yourself best, so predict how the future you turned out. You’ll be able to see how you have changed overtime and little surprises that you would have never expected. You will have impacted the lives of even more people than right now. You will be loved by even more people than now. Life gets harder as we get older, and you should remind the future you that everything will eventually work out.
Loving yourself should be a consistent aspect of your life—right now, ten years ago and ten years from now. Each version of you is special and unique. Life is hard, so show yourself some mercy this Valentine’s Day!