My Journey of Self-Love

I remember being in college knowing I didn’t love myself. I remember wondering if I ever had. I remember wondering when I would wake up and finally feel like I was enough for myself. My version of self-love was based on how I was loved and viewed by others. Not taking the time to reflect on what self-love meant put me in the position to constantly pick apart the imperfections I felt in my emotions and the imperfections I saw in the mirror every day, because these were the external factors that everyone else was seeing. For a majority of my life I’ve failed to give myself enough credit for what I’m capable of and who I am. This and the fear of not being good enough in the eyes of others has held me back from understanding how to love not only myself, but understanding what love should be.

I thought that in order to love myself, I needed to meet the expectations that both I had set for myself and that society had set. I thought that love was something to be earned, not something that I necessarily just deserved. How could I love myself when I knew I could be better? How could I love myself when I saw what society pushes as the ideal woman to be? How could I love myself when I didn’t feel love from the people I loved? How could I love myself when I felt I wasn’t worthy of being loved by anyone? It was this convoluted, self-pity black hole that I drove myself into, viewing self-love as something that I needed to achieve, when in reality it’s something that I needed to practice. And I think the first time I truly practiced self-love was when I started recovery.

The ironic thing is that I thought I had been practicing self-love for some time at that point. I thought that when I started to invest in my fitness and diet that I was practicing self-love. And in a way, I really was trying. I was making a conscious choice to push myself to be better and was prioritizing my lifestyle choices. However, the driving factors behind these choices were self-hate and the constant need for perfection, not self-love. I thought that I was showing myself love by pushing my body to its limits and molding my life around what I thought I needed to be. I wasn’t listening to my mind and my body – I was listening to my eating disorder. My eating disorder told me that restricting my diet was practicing self-love. It told me that by only putting clean foods in my body, and only putting food in my body when I absolutely needed, I was practicing strength. And strength was worthy of love. My eating disorder told me that pushing my body to its limit was demonstrating what I was capable of and could continue to push. But my eating disorder took away my ability to feel anything outside of that cycle of intense control and restriction. So how could I expect to love myself when I had numbed that feeling out?

When I started recovery, there was a lot of pain that I had to address. I was already in pain before I started recovery because of the extreme conditions I pushed my body and mind to, but this pain was different. This was the pain I pushed down throughout my childhood and young adult life. The pain I refused to feel was a hurdle in my journey to find self-love. Because what I started to learn in recovery is what has given me the ability to practice self-love. The words we speak to ourselves and the actions we take to address the pain in our lives heavily impact the people we choose to be. I was waking up every morning telling myself that I wasn’t enough yet. I was treating my body as a machine that had no breaking point. At no point in time did I stop to think that I could choose to love myself, despite the imperfections that I used to hate.

And what I’ve learned is that self-love turns out to be acknowledging these imperfections as what makes me, me. Self-love means listening to my body. It means that if I’m too tired to workout, I can rest. It means that I can go on vacation for two weeks and leave my workout clothes behind, because honoring my mind and body means living in the moment and enjoying life without restriction. But self-love can also mean pushing myself in a workout because I want to get stronger. Self-love means giving my body the nutrients it needs but also allowing myself to eat what I crave. Self-love means practicing the mindset of everything in moderation, instead of the all-or-nothing, black-and-white mindset. But most importantly, self-love means that how I see myself isn’t decided by what I think others view of me. I can choose to wake up and love myself every day, regardless of any other factor in my life.

And I think that’s something important to highlight… I don’t wake up every morning feeling like my absolute best self. Sometimes I wake up anxious, sometimes I end up having a bad body image day, or sometimes I’m just exhausted both mentally and physically. Does this mean I restrict myself or have an insane workout to try and feel better about it? No. It means that I show myself some extra love that day. Maybe that means going out to dinner that night and getting my favorite meal, maybe it means I do go workout but keep the balance of knowing when I need to stop pushing myself, maybe it means that I lay on the couch all day, maybe it means I get some fresh air, maybe it means I lean on my boyfriend a little bit more for support, or maybe it means I take the time to journal or reflect on what’s causing my anxiety. None of these actions revolve around proving to myself that I am worthy of self love that day, because I already know I am. It’s about practicing what makes me feel good and what benefits my mental and physical health. And that is likely going to be different than what someone else may need – but that’s the key. My journey to self-love is unique to me.

In the end, my journey to self-love is ever-evolving. It’s a constant learning opportunity of what I may need at a particular point in time in my life. I can accept that I don’t have all the answers for a perfect life, and frankly, I don’t want them. Being able to accept myself and love myself unconditionally is my priority going forward. I don’t need to earn the love I give myself, just as I don’t need or want to earn the love of anyone else. And again, I know there are going to be hard days, but what matters is that I take those days in stride and learn from the, rather than give in to them.