Life is unpredictable and messy. It can upset calm waters or drown you in overwhelming feelings that make you run away. You spent so much of your time putting your love in people, your career, living your best life, that you forgot one crucial thing. To put a little bit of love in yourself.
It's a sad day when you realize that all the love in external aspects life has to offer is temporary and fleeting and that learning to love yourself again starts with mourning the fact that you forgot all about it in the first place. Loving yourself again starts with forgiving yourself for everything that happened in the moments before. You put a lot of love into people who may not deserve it, a career that may be not what you dreamed of, and experiences that you wish you could take back. And it's ok that you did that. All that love can now be turned inward.
Loving yourself again means knowing who you are and if you forgot who that is, it is completely fine to try to find it again. It includes finding out what made you so lost and negligent. It is going through the hard road of healing yourself from the inside out and tackling the pain. Knowing yourself means finding out all the dark corners of your soul and figuring out what it all means to you.
Loving yourself means also knowing what you actually love to do. It means rediscovering hobbies that you left untouched or backpacking your way across the globe. It means finding all the lemons in your life and attempting to make lemonade out of it and finding that it tastes pretty damn good. Loving yourself means knowing that you love to have new experiences for yourself and that you are making you a priority.
Loving yourself is to make hard decisions. If you are the person that wants everyone to be happy except yourself, then make the decision to finally do right by you. Make the decision to cut people out of your life that are not serving a higher purpose or take the unpopular opinion because you believe in it. It means not binge drinking on a Sunday night or putting off going to see a therapist. Hard decisions are hard for a reason but making the right decisions for yourself means you already love yourself more than you know.
Loving yourself is setting all of your relationships right. It means putting boundaries where you need to and letting people in that will get you. It means being vulnerable to the possibility that the people you want will always be there and that you will attract only the people that are meant to be with you. It means amending your mistakes and apologizing for your wrongdoings. It means holding your loved ones to a higher regard than you did before and not ever taking them for granted. It means sending one more text, making one more phone call, and having one more conversation so that the people in your life will know that you will show up for them.
No one ever said that loving yourself would be an easy process but everyone says that once you love yourself again that it will be worth it in the end.
