From a young age, I was taught by Beyonce’s Me, Myself, and I how important self-love and independence are. Although I was taught this message from a young age, it has always been something I struggled with. For as long as I can remember, I have had issues with my self esteem and self confidence. I was always self conscious about my body and how it looked. The obsession with being skinny continued during my junior year of high school when I developed an eating disorder.

Although the concepts of self-love and self-acceptance were taught to me numerous times, I never was able to practice self-love with myself. It always seemed like a foreign concept to me. I thought it was a nice ideal, but it was too difficult to actually obtain. Now, I’m realizing more and more how important self-love is. I have also started to implement self-love into my life. Although it was hard at the beginning, every day, loving myself becomes a little bit easier.

Recently, I was introduced to a quote that I think ties in nicely with the concept of self-love. It read: "Self-worth is so vital to your happiness. If you don’t feel good about you, it’s hard to feel good about anything else." The first step is always to love oneself. If you are not able to love yourself, you will never be able to love anyone else. Often times, we are hardest on ourselves; we are our own worst critics. Instead of being so hard on ourselves, we need to ask ourselves, what would we tell our loved ones? What would we tell our best friends?

Based on our answers to those questions, that’s how we should talk to ourselves. That’s the voice we should hear. Although self-love can be incredibly challenging and take a lot of courage, it is worth it in the end.