My self-love journey has been a very long journey, with plenty of twists and turns. I can recall having negative feelings about myself, my body and my abilities as young as first grade. And while I could take you through that journey, I would like to discuss a more recent journey I have been on.
I have to admit that for the longest time I did not even realize how unhealthy my relationship with myself was. I think I accepted the low feelings about myself as my norm. It wasn’t until after I got separated (and eventually divorced) that I even realized self-love was something I needed. It wasn’t until then that I even realized how much not loving myself had truly affected me in my life and in my relationships. Until then I thought I had decent self-esteem. And then I went through my divorce and it challenged every positive feeling I had about myself. There are three major lessons I learned about self-love through my divorce.
Lack of self-love will cause you to settle.
One major realization I had, is that I settled into my marriage and into a lot of my past relationships because I did not believe I deserved better. I realized that I was constantly “going with the flow”, saying yes to everything and everyone. This is not to say that the men I dated were “not good enough”. But a lot of them were just not for me and instead of me leaning into that I made excuses and made them fit, when I maybe could have found someone that was more aligned with who I am.
But beyond romantic relationships, I was settling in life. Again, still going with the flow instead of creating the life that I wanted to live. I was constantly setting my sights too low and expecting the bare minimum in any situation. I even realized that I was denying myself simple pleasures in life because I did not feel like I “needed” them.
Self-Acceptance is a necessary part of self-love.
Loving yourself while you are working on yourself is HARD. Self-love is an ongoing, life-long process. And it is challenging to love and accept yourself when you are actively working on healing or changing certain aspects of yourself physically, emotionally, mentally or spiritually. But accepting ALL of you, even while healing, is so necessary. You cannot start from a false place. You have to meet yourself where you are. Often, we think of acceptance as meaning we are okay with something and don’t want it to change. But we can accept something and still have a desire to change it. Acceptance just means that you release resistance and lean into what is.
One thing I had to learn to accept about myself is my body. For most of my life I have hated my body. I had to learn that even as I am working on changing my physical appearance, I have to accept all of me now. Because I won’t start loving myself when the weight is off, when my skin clears or when my hair grows longer. As Lori Deschene says, “you cannot hate yourself into a version of yourself that you can love”.
Loving yourself can be a lonely process
When you are truly working on improving your relationship with yourself, you may find the process to be lonely at times. And this is because it takes conscious effort to recognize those spaces, people and things that make you feel bad about yourself. And once you do, you often create distance. And as you start loving yourself, you find that you are not willing to deal with less than what you deserve. In order for me to really love me I had to take inventory of how situations, relationships, and interactions made me feel. So that I could remove or avoid triggers that made me feel bad about myself. In the process of doing this I ended up unfollowing accounts/ people and being more intentional about who I allowed in my space. I also became a lot more picky about romantic relationships as well, where I used to say “yes”, I started saying “no”. And while that feels good, it can also feel lonely.
You may also find more of an interest in solitude. You might also realize you enjoy your company more and have less of a need to fill a void with someone else’s presence. I know I did. I’m really my best friend and one of the coolest people I know.
I have learned a lot throughout my self-love journey, but these are some of the most important lessons I learned through experiencing what I perceived as a major rejection. As I see it rejection is just redirection from a force greater than us. And in this case, I was redirected back to myself. While I have a much better relationship with myself now, my self-love journey is not yet complete. And I am not sure it will ever be.
