I hate myself.

I used to wake up every morning, look in the mirror, and repeat this to my reflection. Like clockwork, I would say it over and over again. Those words would follow me around all day long for years.

Why were my legs the size that they were? Why was my face shaped that way? Why didn’t I look like the people in the magazines and on TV shows? I just wanted to be like them.

For years, I spent every second wanting to be someone else. Someone different from who I was. Because for years, I hated everything about me.

I don’t really know what changed. I don’t know when it happened. But one day I woke up and realized I was tired of hating myself. It was draining and it took everything from me. Pointing out to myself all the things that were wrong with me, wasn’t helping. It was bringing me down.

There are hundreds of people out there who will look at me and name all the things that could be better. I will have a thousand critics in my lifetime. Why would I want to add myself to that list?

At the end of my senior year of high school, I really got into the idea of self-love. It just kind of hit me that this was who I was. Boisterous laugh, thick thighs and everything in between. All of these things are what made me, me. And I didn’t want to fight it anymore.

I used to fantasize about a boy who would fall in love with me and fix all my insecurities. I thought having a guy tell me he loved me would fill all the holes inside me. I kept telling myself that was all I needed. Someone else to love me and then I would be OK.

But how can you allow someone to really, truly love you, when you don’t love yourself?

I quickly came to realize that having a guy tell me he loved me, didn’t make me feel any more whole. It made me happy, but it didn’t make me look at myself any differently.

You can’t fill a person from the outside in. It has to come from the inside out.

Once I realized this, my entire outlook shifted. I’m a hopeless romantic, and I want more than anything to fall in love. I want to have an epic, beautiful romance with a man. But I will never get that until I learn to have an epic, beautiful romance with myself.

This is something that for the past three years I’ve been working tirelessly on. It’s not easy to look at yourself in the mirror, see all the things you wished were different for years, and say, “You know what? I love myself. I wouldn’t change anything about me.”

My body and my weight will be things that I struggle with, probably for my entire life. But every day that I wake up and tell myself that I am beautiful because of all the things that I am insecure about, is a step in the right direction.

Even still, there are bad days. Days where I can’t walk by the mirror without ducking my head and cringing because I don’t want to see what is reflected back at me.

And then there are good days. Days where I hardly leave the mirror because I just can’t take my eyes off myself.

For years, I used to ask myself if it was even possible for a man to ever love me. At the end of the road, I hope to be asking myself if it is even possible for a man to love me as much as I love myself.