Self-Love

Loving yourself

It seems like it should be the easiest thing to do. It’s almost impossible to not love a child or for the child to hate themselves when they are young. So, how is it that almost every adult struggles to love themselves? Remember?The simpler times, when we were kids and had no problems with ourselves or our behavior. As we grow up, our parents and society teach us a plethora of things that a fully-functioning decent member of the society should be equipped with.

Now, mostly these are good things, like social etiquette, how to decide right from wrong, healthy lifestyles, so on and so forth. As young adults we try to abide by them and be decent human beings, but most of the times we slip up.

There are just so many rules and things that one needs to follow to be a productive member of the society. It is very overwhelming and easy to give up. That’s where things start getting scary. We get busy in making money, having a social life and political views and other n number of things that “we think” matter. In all this mayhem, without even realising we start doing things like everyone else we know and start seeking their validation for all our actions. No one is perfect and of course we fall short in various aspects but instead of understanding that we are only human, we start penalizing ourselves for not being good enough for the people around us. Upon not getting the validation we seek, we start looking for answers. Answers to questions like why can’t I succeed in my profession? Why doesn’t my partner love me? Why can I never fulfill my parent’s expectation? What is wrong with me? Am I not attractive? How can I be more confident?

In the quest for finding the solutions to the above questions, we turn to the self-help aisle of the library or internet.

I am an average 25 year old Indian girl, I have been through all the above mentioned thought process and after rather extensive thinking and analysis, my introspection has resulted in the following: I did not necessarily seek validation from the society, but I never was good enough a daughter or sister. I don’t know when I started thinking negatively about myself and lost my self-confidence. There are alot of things I used to be good at as a child, but I stopped doing them as an adult. I stopped getting joy in doing those things. I felt less and less excited about things that used to make me really happy. I became lazy and stopped putting in the effort to make myself or anyone else happy. I started living a slug life, doing only the things that were needed to survive. I stopped loving myself.

I have decided to change that. I have decided re-discover myself, to become the person, the 13 year old me would respect and love. I now know that I am human and can not be perfect, but I will strive to be better. I will work on myself and this time I won’t give up. I will not half-ass through life, that is not the the kind of person I want to be. In this journey I am going to work on various aspects of my life. The goal is to become a the best version of myself. At the end of this journey I want to be able to say that I gave it my all and I am proud of myself!

If you can relate to this and are on a similar journey, please know that you are not alone.