Learning to Love Yourself in Private

If you have even chosen to go on this journey it should not be shameful. No, it is not selfish, and no you are not a bad person for putting yourself down in the first place. I decided to dig deeper into my self-love journey this year but I have dabbled in acts of kindness towards myself for the past year. Like deciding to start consistently working out, or even getting my hair done a few times because I wanted to. When you first start you never want to stop, I would go weeks thinking I did truly love who I was, but then there will always be something that knocks you off your path and the only thing you have to decide if whether you get back on.

No, but that is only the short version.
Maybe you've decided to tell your friends or your partner, maybe even your parents, but once you have told them you feel like maybe they don't understand. They probably said they do, you can tell that they mean well but you know they just don't fully get it. Maybe they all understood and encouraged your journey, but for most people that is not the case. If telling people in your real-life did not work out you definitely should not give up in finding a community for you. I decided to find my group with this blog, one day I hope people can come here to find people who are also on the same journey. Some people will follower Instagrammers or join a Facebook group e, and some people find journaling and keeping your thoughts accountable seems to help them. Whatever method you chose to find a group of like-minded people just know you are 100% not alone.

I, like a lot of people, tend to compare myself to others. Right, when I am about to make groundbreaking progress I see someone else who just does what I wish I could accomplish so effortlessly. So I then think to myself "If they can do it with such ease then they must have been born with it, so why should I even try." For example, let's say you are trying to lose weight in a very healthy way, you first start by exercising and eating foods that nourish your body. You start seeing results and you are thrilled, but then you see a friend who is thinner than you. You start to get frustrated because she does not work out or eat as well as you do, and yet she maintains her physique with ease. When you are put in a situation like this it is hard to see the progress you made as anything worth celebrating. It is also hard to not have negative feelings towards the person you are comparing yourself to. In times like these, we should try to remember no matter how much we think we know this person we do not know them entirely. The only person we truly know front to back is ourselves, we can choose to hate, hate her, hate ourselves, but in a world full of hate I chose to show love. I choose to show myself love my getting back to my goals, yes we got sidetracked but you can not tell me one person who has not. To get back on the path I like to remember a few things.

• I am only trying to improve myself and no one else.
• My journey will not be linear, everyone makes mistakes.
• Someone else's beauty is not the absence of my own.

When you fall off the wagon it is easy to quickly criticize yourself, but as an act of self-love, we should all try and forgive ourselves for this.

Somedays you want to quit. You want to not care about improving yourself because you have more pressing issues on your mind. But, any self-improvement journey will always be a constant choice, you have to wake up every single day and chose you. Of course, it is okay to slip up every now and then, if you didn't then you must be the only person on earth who has. You are the only person who will be with you through everything so chose yourself because when the times are hardest not everyone will choose you.