"You do you."
Three words that you have either said to someone else or you have had it said to yourself before, and the power behind these three simple words is greater than most of us know. It is a small piece of encouragement that is more than just telling you to focus on yourself. It is that pick-me-up you needed in order to gain that little extra boost of confidence in order to love yourself, to buy that apartment because you wanted to buy it, to move to a new state, to do something because you wanted to do it. Sure it sounds selfish to 'do you' and to only think of yourself but there is a difference between focusing on yourself in order to look out for yourself and doing it for yourself for selfish reasons.
You do you is more than just a silly saying that gets tossed around a lot these days; it is something you should incorporate into your daily routine. Focusing on yourself is important and the key to finding out who you are as a person, and a lot of us do not do that. Finding who you are as a person is essential to relationships because loving yourself helps you love someone else. This is why it is so important to find yourself before finding your other half, why it is so important to do you before saying I do.
Maybe it was just my mother who used to say this phrase to my sisters and I all the time but it is something that I had never thought too much about until recently. She would say, 'you can not possibly love someone if you do not yet first love yourself'. I remember after my sister's first relationship ended and she went to seek her out for advice and my mother had said what she had told us when we were younger. I remember thinking that she sounded like a broken record on repeat. 'But I do love myself,' my sister had said
But it wasn't until my own failed relationship that I realized what my mother's words had really meant. During the time that I was with my ex, I would never do what I wanted to do because I knew he did not like something. I was constantly changing what I liked and did not like based on what my ex had liked. After we had broken up I realized how different I was and that I needed to find myself again. My mother's words were still in the back of my head and now I understood, finally, what they truly meant. I needed to do what I wanted because I wanted to do it. If I liked something, I could not be ashamed to like it, and this is important for everyone to know whether you are single or taken.
And with that being said, you do you boo.
