THAT KIND OF SELF LOVE THAT LIBERATES
My math teacher always asked me to find X. I always wondered why I was the one whose mathematical journey had been doomed to find something that was lost for the longest time. I mean lets be real my mother was asked to find X, my big sister tried to find X all this was to no avail. So what made him think that I was the guru who would find it? Lol. I probably never found X but I found something better, I found happiness but that is not what we are unpacking today. Scratch that, that is all we are unpacking today.
2018 was a redefining year for me. A year of eternal shifts. It is the year all my insecurities met for a one night stand and the product of that night being some very serious Ls. I am probably speaking for many when I say that this year served me some major Ls but these losses came wrapped up in lessons and for that I will be eternally grateful. It is the year I said no to people who took so much of my mental energy and did very little for me and said yes to self-love but not just any kind of self-love, the kind of love that liberates.
At the beginning of this year, I wanted nothing more than to be in a relationship. A romantic relationship. I will forever be a hater of Telemundo and all romantic sequels because all they did for me was paint a very shallow picture of what love really is. I mean don’t get me wrong all ye lovers of soaps and the lovey dovey BS but there’s so much we are not told about love that can only be learnt once you are in and out of a relationship. So I prayed and lucky for me through this year I was in and out of several relationships. Well some only lasted a minute but the experience is what matters. It was from these relationships that I learnt the importance of self-love. The vitality of putting yourself first and loving every aspect of yourself.
No one will ever love you whole unless you treat yourself as such. Its so funny how quick we are to say I love you to our friends, our best friends and our significant others when probably all we are telling ourselves is how we should not eat too much fat, how we should cut down on the junk or how we should get up early for a workout. Listen, out of all the people in the world you talk to yourself the most, so what exactly are you saying? It’s a paradox that loving yourself will require more energy and you will have to be more deliberate than loving anyone else.
I used to be the kind of person who would encounter a pretty lady, a confident person or probably just a girl who even spoke better than me and immediately feelings of insecurity and inadequacy would creep in. I would then begin to imagine a place where I never had to compete, a place where I was the one who called the shots, a place where I was a perfect ten. The only thing that sucked about this place was that it wasn’t real and sooner or later, I had to snap out of it and face reality. Reality is harsh, reality is like your alarm at four thirty waking you up when you have an exam to read for, you have no choice but to wake up! Reality reminded me that am not a perfect ten, that I wasn’t calling the shots and the saddest part of all is that, there will always be someone who will be better than me.
So the billion dollar question that was left unanswered is, what exactly was I? Truth is, we define who we are. The sad part about society is that it gave us a yardstick to measure our beauty by and if we don’t fit, we spend our lives trying to prove ourselves. It sucks that I came to learn this late but the definition of beauty has and will never exist. We were created a complete package with everything we need and once you realize that then you become comfortable in your own skin. Funniest thing, I don’t know about you but I would always seek the highest level of perfection. Lucky for me I realized that perfection is only achieved when you learn to be the best version of yourself. That is the truest and purest form of perfection because we are all different and different is beautiful. Every lack of curve, every lack of luster is for a reason so never once feel inadequate about the person you are because you didn’t create yourself and you never chose the intricacies of how you would look like and even if you would have been given the opportunity to choose, would you have chosen to be in a different body? If the latter is true, then this blog post is definitely for you!
Your life is what you make it. If you want to waste the best years of your life second guessing yourself or trying to be good enough in the eyes of people who don’t matter, then go right ahead. As you do that however, remember this; self-love is a foundation for all relationships. So as you constantly self-doubt, that same energy is being channeled to all your other relationships. That to me is the saddest way to go through life. The minute you realize that no one is perfect and that everyone out here is just winging it, then you’ll say bye to your insecurities and live your best life. That way, you will not only have reached a dangerous level of freedom, you will have liberated yourself and unconsciously you will have liberated others as well. You would have found X and there’s nothing more beautiful. I thank God am not a solid ten because I think every guy would be served a restraining order lol!
