This post is in response to Kelly-Ann Maddox’s #SelfLoveStories. Here is her video if you want to know more.
My journey with self love, like most people's, has been full of ups and downs. Overall, I believe my ability to love myself was very strong throughout my life, or I never would have made it through childhood and adolescence. I just know that somewhere when I was a child, somebody told me that I deserved to be loved and that I could be anything I wanted to be. I believed those things, and took them to heart, so when people tried to tell me I couldn’t do something because of “X,” my immediate reaction was, “well, clearly they don’t know what they’re talking about,” and I could easily dismiss the haters and naysayers.
This got more and more difficult as I got older. I had a reaction to asthma medicine when I was 8, which made me gain a lot of weight overnight. Combined with my standard American diet, I became obese. The bullying and lack of family support to help me get healthy led to emotional eating. Eventually, I lost most of the weight and was no longer obese, just overweight, but I was still an emotional eater. And I still secretly hated myself for the way I looked and felt.
Loving yourself gets hard when the people who are supposed to love you unconditionally - your parents - don’t. I really struggled to keep loving myself, even when I was hating so many things about myself. I was called a selfish bitch on a daily basis for trying to take responsibility of myself and putting me first. I was raised to believe that my only worth was to sacrifice everything I was and loved for others, and I was rejecting that paradigm. I was struggling to love myself and at the same time being told that I was a hateful person who didn’t deserve it.
You can’t help others if you can’t take care of yourself, and anyone who would demand that of you needs way more help than you can give them. They also need self love.
The biggest tip I have for self love is to break away from people who make you feel like you don’t deserve it. This can be very difficult, but it is the most important. You may have to completely disassociate with family, leave friends behind, and find new people to be around like I did. It was the best decision.
The next thing, is to realize that you do deserve unconditional love — FROM YOURSELF! You will rarely get it from others, but you can get it from yourself. This may take a long time to accomplish, but it’s worth the effort.
I’m still struggling with my weight, and have lost and gained several times. I got to my goal weight, but still hadn’t addressed emotional eating, so I gained it back and then more, despite being incredibly athletic and eating healthy foods. But I didn’t give up on myself. I love myself so I’m committed to being healthy and happy. I already knew the ways that didn’t work for me, so I kept looking for ways to help me understand my body and how to care for it.
I have also done some serious shadow work, which is ongoing. In order to love myself unconditionally, I have to look at the ugly parts and the things that I hate and address them. It can be messy sometimes, but mostly it’s a relief. Now, those little shadows of myself aren’t manifesting as a false sense of hunger.
It has taken a long time to get to where I can love myself even though I’m not satisfied with how I look or feel right now. I think this is an important distinction that isn’t really addressed enough. I’m not happy with everything about myself, but I love myself anyway, and don’t hate the parts that aren’t perfect. That’s the key element. Loving yourself means accepting all parts of who you are, but you still have room to grow and change.
I’m still hungry for life and health and magic and love. And then I feed myself with it! I wish the same for you!
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