You might be wondering “Claire this is a proactivity/self-improvement blog – why are you talking about self love?” Hear me out: self-love and proactivity are linked and come hand in hand. Without including self love as part of your self-improvement journey, it’ll be tougher to see yourself as a proactive person that makes better, lasting changes for yourself.
Loving yourself doesn’t mean you ignore the bad and ugly parts of yourself and only loving the good parts. It means accepting everything about yourself, including all the bad choices that we make, the bad things that we go through, and who we were in the past and who we are in the present moment. Loving Yourself involves listening to your own voice, trusting and believing in yourself even when no one else does.
As we get older and navigate our way through society, it’s easy to be drowned out by the voice’s of others and by societal expectations of who we’re supposed to be and not who we want to be. In turn, this makes the process of improving ourselves even harder because a lot of doubt can come up as we’re trying to make changes in our lives.
Throughout my life, I’ve been called different labels by other people in different parts of my life: my friends, coworkers, relatives and even my immediate family. I’ve been called things like fat, no initiative, procrastinator, shy – lots of things that you wouldn’t associate with a self improvement blog. Surprising, right?
Even though I had so many attempts to make improvements throughout the years, nothing seemed to really stick until I started on my self love journey around 2019. It’s because no matter how much I wanted to change, deep down I believed in all the things people said about me. In the end nothing changed until I slowly learned to love myself.
With the rise of the ‘self-improvement’ movement and all it’s related movements, initially I got sucked into a ‘toxic positivity’ mindset. I thought that to be truly happy I needed always love myself and that meant always being in a happy, positive mood. This lead me to not really addressing the things underneath that held me back and I’ve been feeling stuck until now.
I didn’t truly understand what it actually meant to love myself until late 2020 when I discovered BTS’ music (though that’s a story for another time). Through the messages of the songs and what the group stood for, I learned a lot about self love and in turn, self-acceptance. Embracing myself not just for the person that I am today, but embracing my past self, my past failures and my past mistakes.
To quote Kim Namjoon (stage name RM), Leader of BTS from his 2018 United Nations Speech:
‘Maybe I made a mistake yesterday, but yesterday’s me is still me. Today, I am who I am with all my faults and my mistakes. Tomorrow, I might be a tiny bit wiser, and that’ll be me too. These faults and mistakes are what I am, making up the brightest stars in the constellation of my life. I have come to love myself for who I am, for who I was, and for who I hope to become.’
After learning to love myself, I embraced everything about me including my faults. I stopped seeing these things as something to be ashamed of and instead, as RM said above, ‘the brightest stars in the constellation of my life’. In loving myself, I started to accept all of my bad days, my ugly days and even the days where I feel like I’m at my lowest. It’s during these points of my life that I learn to accept who I am and love the person that can get myself through all of those days.
Eventually, as my love in myself grows, I realise that what people or society says about me doesn’t really matter. Just being myself and being alive and human on this earth is more than enough. What I say about myself is what’s most important and I’m the only one that can determine myself.
In turn, when you love yourself, you’ll start to live as how you want to live and pursue the things that you want to pursue. You stop caring about the perception of others and you’ll start to do things that helps in growing your self love and stop the things that harm it. It’s freeing because no matter what happens in life, no matter what people say about you, it won’t matter because your own self-love will show you the truth within and help you stay on course, whatever that may be for you.
For some of us, it’s still tough to love ourself depending on our environment. To the people out there in situations where it’s hard to love yourself, my message to you is: you’re not alone because you have yourself with you. Right now you may be going through a rough patch in life but never forget to thank yourself for getting through the day. The ‘you’ that’s going through struggle right now is just as loveable and deserving of love just like everyone else out there. The more belief and love you have in yourself, eventually the opportunities to live authentically will grow.
I will admit that there are days when it’s hard to love myself. When those days happen I give myself a break and do something relaxing. I count all of the things that I’m grateful for and I talk to myself and pick things about myself that are good and tell myself that it’s ok to simply exist and be myself.
While these past few years with the pandemic may have been tough on all of us, don’t forget to love yourself. Life is full of ups and downs but as long as you stay true to yourself and live full of love, you’ll be able to reach the authentic life you desire.
Becoming Proactive 