Everyone says "practice self-love!" or "love yourself!" but no one really says how or how DIFFICULT it is.
The thing about self-love is that it's not about getting love from other people. Other can people can tell you that you're worthy of love as much as you want, whether it's friends, family, romantic partners, etc. But at the end of the day unless you do the work to learn how to love yourself, you'll never believe them. My journey towards self love began in high school. At the time my goal wasn't to love myself. I'm not sure if self-love was as big of a term in 2014 as it is now. Except for the way people would offhandedly say #loveyourself without meaning anything by it. My preliminary goal was to boost my self-esteem. I wanted to become self confident so I could push past my crippling anxiety and become less awkward. I was really concerned with how other people saw me and my constant self-hatred made it difficult to portray the persona of someone cool and confident. Wikihow became my best friend as I would regularly look up articles on "how to develop self-esteem and self-confidence." The articles did eventually help me but my reasoning for improving my self-worth was flawed. I was hoping that by becoming more confident I would impress people and be more liked, versus using it as a tool for my own happiness. Around the same time period, I started equating self-love with accepting your physical looks. I hated how I looked, physically. Spending my whole life being one of the only Black people in all White schools and towns, I thought that I was really ugly just because I was the only person who was Black. Everyone I saw that exemplified beauty was White, whether it was on TV or media or people I knew in real life. I was convinced that in order to be pretty I had to be White so I gave up on the concept of being attractive. By college I had become more comfortable and confident with myself and race to the point where I thought I was beautiful and loved the way I looked, and so I thought I had finally achieved self-love. Over the next couple years, though, I learned that when it comes to self-love, your perception of your beauty has to be more than skin deep. I thought that I was beautiful but I still hated myself. I hated my personality, my sense of humor, my constant lurking anxiety and depression and I felt worthless as a person. I felt the need to hide myself and just hope that my beauty on the inside would eventually catch up with my beauty on the outside. I would spend a lot of my time either trying to diminish parts of myself, change or improve them so that I could finally get to a place where "I was worthy" of full self-love. It was only very recently that I started learning how to actually love me (ALL of me) and that I started to learn that self-love isn't about changing yourself (on the outside or inside) to become someone that you can love. But instead, accepting yourself for exactly who you are, flaws and all, (SCARY I KNOW!) and learning to love that person. Read Part 2 for the steps to Self-Love.
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Naija SunshineHi! My name is Efe and this is my mental health blog where I'll be talking about my experiences with mental illness, as well as my thoughts and tips. Archives
September 2021
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