After much thought and consideration, I have decided to come back to blogging. Don’t get me wrong, I had some fun with the podcast while I was doing it. I also realized I feel much more comfortable writing than I do actually speaking things aloud. That’s all part of the process though. Trial and error. Seeing what works and what doesn’t. What feels good and makes us happy and what doesn’t.
Speaking of which. Isn’t life like one big trail and error? We might try different schools, jobs, locations, relationships etc. And in the end, it all leads to the realization of what does and doesn’t work for us. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty grateful for it all. All the wrong things led me to figure out the right things and all the right things kept me from all the wrong things.
We may not understand everything when we are in the middle of it but that’s where self love comes into play. No matter what is going on or how it’s affecting us, it is so important to be able to find a way to love ourselves through it. I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t for a long time. I went about things all wrong. I didn’t really know what self love was, and I definitely didn’t know how to give it to myself.
In fact it was quite the opposite, I hated myself. Royally hated myself for a very long time. Religion made me feel that everything that was going wrong in my life was somehow punishment for something I must have done wrong. We’re taught this concept of heaven and hell and since I felt like I was living in hell on earth, it must have been punishment right? I’m still healing from some religious trauma but that’s not the point of all of this.
I’m also really thankful for religion because while it taught me things that messed me up completely, it also helped me believe in a power greater than myself and that, I needed. Believing in a power greater than myself meant that I wasn’t actually in control. It helped me understand that the things I didn’t like about myself, my life weren’t all completely my fault. Did I play a role in them? Sure.
A lot of things though are observed and learned as we are growing up and we end up picking them up and living them out unconsciously. And although that’s not an excuse to blame those who taught us, it does give us a little more grace to understand that we can’t be more than what we were taught to be. Well, until we learn that we can of course. And that’s where self love comes back into play here.
If we find throughout our lives that we don’t like who we are or who we are becoming, we are the only ones who have the power to change it. And although we may need help from a higher power or things greater than ourselves like teachers, coaches etc; we do have the power. And that is a true blessing.
Self love means loving ourselves enough to acknowledge and work to change the things that we aren’t proud of. It means learning to love the parts of ourselves that made us who we are today, even if it’s not who we want to be. It means understanding that some things are out of our control. That we didn’t become this version we don’t like overnight and we may not be able to love them overnight either. It means, accepting that we are perfectly imperfect and that in itself makes us perfect.
Truth is, we’re all imperfect because there is no such thing as perfect… Which comes around full circle to mean that we are already perfect just as we are. The word itself literally says “I’m perfect”. So love yourself through the rough patches while you work to become the ideal version of yourself. You deserve it.