I once told a friend about how loving others comes easy to me but self-love, on the other hand, does not. My relationship with loving myself has been complicated. The experiences I’ve faced in various relationships (family, platonic and romantic) have impacted my relationship with self-love. However, loving myself has been an art I’ve been trying to teach myself daily. I have recently come to the realization of the importance of it. After all, the only person you spend your whole life with is yourself.
When it comes to self-love, I ensure this means I am taking care of myself. However, this is easier said than done. With the quick pace our lives are moving at, it can be hard to pause sometimes and take a breather. I’ve learned to take care of myself by incorporating mental health days whenever I feel like I need one. As small as it seems, dedicating a day to myself to improve and work on my physical and mental health shows that I care about my overall wellbeing.
Taking care of myself has also taught me how important it is to stop settling for less. I cannot count the number of times I’ve settled when it comes to relationships. I’ve stayed in a relationship where I had to constantly lower my standards because I believed it was what I deserved. I’ve also been in a situationship where I had to compromise the values I believed in when it came to dating as my love for the other person overpowered my self-love. With friendships, I’ve entertained the presence of toxic friends as I was too afraid of how they would react if I ended the friendship. However, I now realize I was doing a disservice to myself by staying in those situations. All these situations reflect the lack of respect I had for myself by willing staying in unfullfilling and unhealthy relationships.
Therefore, I’ve started to actively work on figuring out what I deserve and expect in all my relationships. I have now made it a point to never compromise the things that are important to me just to please the other person. You never know when someone might enter and/or exit your life and therefore, it is important to listen to your heart and what you want. Your standards are there for a reason and lowering them is equivalent to lowering your perception of your self-worth.
With self-love, I’ve also started to treat myself the way I would treat my friends. For example, if I was having a bad mental health day, instead of beating myself up about the fact that I was being unproductive, I would treat myself to some ice cream (preferably Ben and Jerry’s) to make myself feel better. It is interesting how we can always drop everything and be there for our friends when they are going through a hard time but when it comes to ourselves, we tend to be much more harsh. Viewing myself as a friend has allowed me to show more kindness and respect to myself.
Self-love is complicated. It requires you to uncover the deepest parts of yourself to grow into a better person. It requires you to re-evaluate your relationships, which can be hard. However, I promise the results are worth it. Prioritizing self-love has made me realize my worth and the significance of my presence and I hope it will for you too.