Self Love in Every Situation

Self love. Sounds familiar, but really - how familiar is it?

How much do you really regard your own well-being and happiness?

I would say that you probably struggle with it, just like the rest of us do. Because that's a human thing. But are you waiting for the right time to love yourself? What's stopping you from doing it now?

We need to learn how to love ourselves along every step of the journey. Not just at the end. The goal always seems to be that you need to learn to love yourself, but we seem to push it further and further away. "I'll do it later..." How much later can you wait?

I am on an eternal healing journey. I feel like I will never be done. Maybe I never will be. That's okay. But the point is - I realized that I can't wait to love myself until the end of the journey, because then it's over. And I would have wasted all of that time overthinking it, when I could have just done it. When I could have just taken the actions. When I could have just bought myself flowers just because, or pampered myself in the bath. I could have taken steps instead of thinking that I needed to "reach a certain point" to achieve proper self love.

I am not saying that I am an expert in self love, because I am definitely not. But that's the joy of life... the fact that we always get something new to work towards and work on.

I think of life as a video game. You play the game for the game itself, not just to get to the end and celebrate yourself. You do realize at that point it's over, right? You play the game to play. You live your life to live. So PLAY! LIVE!

Learning to embrace yourself and all of your flaws is playing. Learning to love yourself when you're vulnerable is playing. It's messy, but that's what playing with life is. It's horribly messy and complicated.

Let me tell you a little story. The other night, I was washing my face. I stopped for a second to admire just how beautiful I am in the mirror. How I like my lips and my cute little nose. And it felt so good to know that my self love journey isn't just beginning anymore, it's finally in progress. It's going full force. And it's working.

I came from a place in my mind where I literally tried to poison myself and take away my own breath because I was so upset with the person I was.

And now, even though I struggle sometimes, I actually do really love quite a bit about myself. I definitely love myself more than I used to. That's refreshing. I think it's beautiful that I finally got here.

I know that you can get here too, because all it takes is acceptance:

• Acceptance of the fact that you're not perfect.
• Acceptance of the fact that life is not perfect.
• Acceptance of the fact that we are here to mess up and fall down, just so we can show the world how gracefully we can get back up. Or not so gracefully, really - it's all about how you want to present yourself.

The world isn't watching you to see you fall. They're watching you so they can see how you stand up again.

Our love for ourselves should simply be an extension of our personalities. We should be able to see ourselves the way we see others - as flawed humans who deserve support, recognition, and LOVE every single step of the way.

How useless would it be to save all of the self love for the last year of your life? Is that the goal you're working towards?

Start loving yourself now. Don't waste any more time.