There seems to be one message these days. That you should love yourself, and who you are and everything about you.
It is an excellent message for everyone – that no matter our background, our past, our sexuality, our differences, we should all still love who we are.
And it is a great place to start if you are dealing with self esteem issues, self confidence problems or general self loathing.
We spend a lot of time making a joke out of our general pain, hurt and trauma- I don’t know about you, but for me I think it’s a very British thing to make a joke about it. See, someone asks you who you are, and you jokingly respond ‘just being crushed by the weight of life, but doing fine’.
It’s normal to seem to make our own problems and pain smaller than they actually are, because we always think there’s someone out their doing worse. My personal favourite is always the ‘there’s people starving… what do they have to be depressed about?’. Cue some little hehe from me at how stupid and ignorant that person sounds.
And, from these ashes of limiting our emotions, we have learned that we should love ourselves. When we say we love ourselves… how much do we mean it? How much of it is for show, and to make YOU feel better about yourself?
Fair enough, you’re on the right path by telling yourself that you love yourself- but they always say fake it until you make it.
I can, writing this today, wholeheartedly and 100% say that I do not love myself. I do not love what I see in the mirror, I do not love my flaws, I do not love the person I am. I have doubts about myself, doubts about my past, doubts about my past- and yet, I say that I love myself.
However, plenty of people think that saying you ‘love yourself’ and trying this journey of self discovery, and self esteem boosting, will automatically cure any kind of pent up hate.
Here the truth is: it won’t.
Pretending you ‘love yourself’ will not fix the way you hide the mirror when you take a shower, it won’t stop the heartache, it won’t take away the memories and the years of being told you will never be enough.
You won’t fix your heart in one day- things don’t hold together with just some sellotape. Things don’t fix when you hurriedly shove a staple through them.
It is about understanding you have those memories, and that pain and all those things that happened. And, you won’t love yourself every single day. You will not fall back into love with something that you have hated for so long.
Imagine this- you see an ex who screwed you over years ago. At the time, you were upset and angry, but now, you only feel pure, toxic and poisonous hate. You can’t even look at them, you can’t even see a future with them- you really dislike them. They want to be friends and they want to resolve things with you. Can you be friends straight away? No,you have to forgive, and you have to resolve and sometimes you have to say sorry.
This is the exact same kind of situation. You may have screwed yourself over with self hate, and self loathing- and you may hate yourself. You can’t just become friends with yourself suddenly, and work out some kind of peace. It won’t work that way.
Say that you love yourself, start that process- but don’t expect to be fixed in the first day.
You have to forgive yourself.
You have to heal from your pain.
You can’t erase it.
LegallyFierceFeminist 