I never fully understood the concept of self-love, simply because it was lacking for the better part of my life. When I read about people who ‘suffer’ from a self-love deficit, I ticked all the boxes because I never truly understood my worth and assumed it was a normal thing for most women, until I saw this deficit infiltrate so many parts of my life. A healthy self-regard is not simply new-age shit that we need to adopt. There is empirical evidence that shows the correlation between our life choices, our happiness and relationship success based on our belief about ourselves. This basically means that we can only love another, once we have truly learnt how to love ourselves. We cannot honour the divine in someone else without honouring it within ourselves first. And for so many of us, this is incredibly hard to do.
My journey into this idea of self-love and cultivating it stemmed from my failed relationships. I couldn’t understand why I kept attracting a certain type of man into my life – those who were emotionally detached and sometimes abusive. It was only when I made the connection, that I attract who I am, did I take a step back to evaluate. Every one of these failed relationships served as a mirror for me, revealing those parts of me that needed tender loving care. I had to learn how to love, honour, respect and treat myself with kindness in order to receive that back in return.
But, let me say this frankly…self-love and living through awareness is FUCKING HARD. It requires constant introspection and the gentle in-pouring of love into the broken parts within me. This nascent shift for me is bigger than my words can approximate here with metaphors. It’s the ‘knowing’ that I’ve read so much about and which I am now starting to comprehend. The belief that I am the amalgamation of a fierce and formidable spirit housed within a human body that serves me well. It has nothing to do with the size of my waist, colour of my skin or any other superficial trait.
Today, my invitation to you is this: look at yourself with fresh eyes and marvel at what you’ve done and who you are. Start pouring love into the cracked bits of yourself and watch those pieces merge into something whole. That is an internal job that cannot be executed by another. Love yourself as though your life depended on it, and then watch the effects that self-love has on every single thing you do going forward and watch your relationships transform as you begin to attract only the beautiful things. I know this for a fact as I got to experience the kind of love I have only ever written about and watched in movies, that manifested only when I began to love and honour myself. The mirror effect!