If you’re well-acquainted with Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, you more than likely see constant clichéd posts reminding you to “love yourself,” “love yourself or nobody will,” or my personal favorite, “~*fall in love with yourself first.*~”
Now, if you just finished laughing, you’re totally normal. I see dozens of posts everyday telling me to love myself and have also thought they’re a little cliché and, well, stupid. Let’s face it, in a society that can make us so incredibly self-loathing, it’s flat out hard to love yourself sometimes, no matter what Twitter is telling you.
Aside from the daily, sometimes hourly, reminder that we are, in fact, not all Kylie Jenners and that your latest insta only reached 100 likes, our generation seems to have an intense problem with learning to love ourselves. I know this because I still haven’t quite mastered it yet, either. And I’ve spent the better portion of 20.5 years learning and attempting different ways. What I’ve taken from this and from the behavior of people my age is that we simply just don’t know how to love ourselves.
While love is a feeling, it’s also a verb. We can’t just shove crappy food into our bodies constantly, never utilize that gym membership we have, then shame our bodies in the mirror because they don’t look the way we want to. We can’t go on binge-drinking spurts and expect to feel good afterwards when we can’t get out of bed the next day. We can’t deprive ourselves of the much-needed sleep that college students rely on. We can't rely on Instagram likes or retweets to determine our self-worth. We can’t keep doubting ourselves and telling ourselves we don’t look like her, don’t have the money to dress like that, or don’t have the means to be or look a certain way.
The fact of the matter is, there is only one you. No one will ever be you and while they could sure as hell try, or you could sure as hell try to be someone you’re not, the lingering question remains: Why would you ever want to be anyone other than yourself?
We fill our brains with unrealistic images of what we should be like. Newsflash: We shouldn’t be like anything. We should just be ourselves. We have to love ourselves for exactly who we are, even if your hair isn’t always perfectly curled or you’ve got some acne here and there. We need to be open to learning about our feelings, open to learning about ourselves. We cannot neglect our physical, mental, or emotional health any longer. All this does is create a spiral of negativity which we inevitably have set ourselves up for.
In addition to being compassionate with ourselves and getting a grasp on our physical, mental and emotional needs, we live in a culture where making comparisons is just a part of our genetic makeup. We are constantly comparing ourselves to this, that, or whatever. Again, this mentality sets us up for failure already. It makes us into judgmental people and the person we judge harshest is ourselves. Learning to love ourselves is so imperative and especially crucial in our relationships with other people. Once we learn to give ourselves the attention and love we deserve, we are better equipped to give that same love to another human being.
Find love in who you are, not what others may think of you, or how many people decided you looked decent on Facebook today, so they gave you that big fat "like." Think if you took five minutes every day to list the things you love about yourself. It becomes habit. And habit sticks.
We cannot be someone else. We can only be ourselves. And that, is more than enough. Be self-loving, not self-loathing.
