Searching for Self-Love Within Your Soul

“Fall in love with taking care of yourself. Fall in love with the path of deep healing. Fall in love with becoming the best version of yourself but with patience, with compassion, and respect to your own journey.” s mcnutt

The act of practicing self-love has always been somewhat difficult for me. I knew that I could not write a blog post talking about how I am thriving in the department of loving and respecting myself because truthfully, I’d be lying. I am still working very hard on finding my own worth and embracing all that I am.

I have spent the large majority of my life with the mindset that I must “push” or “punish” myself in order to accomplish the things I want in life. This whole “pushing yourself” mindset is great to have if you are “pushing” yourself positively towards your goals and aspirations. To be determined and focused is not a bad thing, in fact it’s the complete opposite. It’s the “punishing” yourself part that can definitely be problematic to your self-esteem and to your feeling of self-worth.

I tend to focus on the things I did wrong in my past instead of focusing on the things I did right. I have a hard time giving myself credit for my accomplishments because I feel like I “push” myself to be and do better each and every day. On the flip side, I give myself negative criticism way more than I give myself positive reinforcement. Although this mindset because has helped me in ways become successful in my career, my education, and my life, there are also dark sides to this form of thinking.

I hold myself accountable in any and all situations that go negatively in my life. I’ll be the first to admit that I am wrong, the first to apologize (sometimes even for things that I truthfully do not understand what I did wrong), and I’m the always quick to identify the traits about myself that have a negative impact on others around me. This is a mature mindset to have, however it can be very toxic when you hold yourself “overly” accountable, especially when I forget how to do the same things for myself.

Do you know or have experienced any of those “toxic thoughts” everyone keeps referring to? They are the ones that scream at you much louder than the healthy thoughts are barely audible. They’re the ones that might keep you up at night, that might hold you back from pursuing your passions and goals, and that might cause you to feel inadequate, lonely, worthless, useless, and empty at times.

There have been and still occasionally are days in which I subconsciously try to find ways to help comfort my own overly-critical feelings of inadequacy by unintentionally tearing other people down in order to build myself back up. I most definitely have recognized this toxic pattern and I’ve taken a lot of time to try to find solutions to it. I can see how much I’ve projected my own insecurities onto others and how it’s had negative effects in their lives. I won’t say I am a master level professional at this aspect of my healing, but I am working through this in my daily life. I also spend my time praying for the strength I need in order to change these things and grow from the mistakes in my past.

You know, I think a lot about the fact that I spend at least, if not more than 75% of the time putting myself down. I feel like I have to almost talk my brain out of my own “toxic thoughts.” I feel like I am actively over-thinking about the work I am doing, the work that needs to be done, and the work I have yet to discover all in order to accomplish my main goal which is to become a better person and version of myself. I struggle to give myself credit for the accomplishments I’ve made because I am constantly finding more things left for me to do in my life. I subconsciously start saying to myself “you’re doing an okay job, it could be better though.” For me, nothing is ever going fully “enough.” I often wonder if my “delayed gratification” mindset that I’ve had in my goal achieving and career-driven life has somehow snuck its way into my personal life.

They say the first step to take in order to solve a problem is to identify it. We must accept our own shortcomings and try to focus our energy on ways to practice healthy self-love, and self-respect.

Although hard to accept and even harder to admit, I truthfully believe a lot of my own insecurities are very much linked to events that happened my childhood. I also think this particular problem is the root cause of the majority of the problems I experience in my relationships and in my life. I believe it holds me back a lot, in life and in my career. After taking time to reflect deep into myself and to process events that have happened in my past, I’ve come to the conclusion that this problem stems from a subconscious core feeling of not being “good enough” and/or feeling “inadequate.”

This might sound silly, but sometimes I feel this this sense of guilt. This is the first time I’ve ever talked about and/or acknowledged this topic to be honest. I do believe that I beat myself up a lot because I do not always believe that I deserve the life I have. I try so hard to be grateful and I try to thank God each and every day for the life he has given me. In fact, I feel awful on the days in which I forget to pray and thank God for blessing me with another day. I feel guilt for being sad sometimes because to me, the things I am feeling sad about are nothing compared to what other people might be feeling. I spend a lot of my time feeling as if I really am selfish and narcissistic, especially after I act like a jerk to someone else. This usually happens because I put my guard up because I am perceiving that the other person is trying to attack me. I know though that most of these problems link back to my own feelings of inadequacy.

I used to tell myself when I was a child, lying alone in bed, crying myself to sleep sometimes after a long, painful, emotional day was “although it is rough for you right now, someone, somewhere out there has it much worse.” I was told for so many years by people close to me that I was this self-centered, selfish, and greedy person. Was I? I truthfully did not know. I mean, I was honestly just a kid. I was too young to fully comprehend and understand some of the concepts people tried to push onto me. I also could not help the reactions of other people which I unfortunately took the blame for many times. This caused me to feel as if I had to “walk on eggshells” per se around almost everyone for most of my life.

Often times during my childhood, I found myself holding in my emotions and/or lying about things that did take place. I not only felt guilty for being upset, but I knew if I did speak on how I felt about something that happened, it would always get worse afterwards. (Trust me, I knew from experience). I always reiterated that phrase: “it could be worse, and someone out there has it worse than you.” I truly think that reinforcement I gave to myself every day did help me grow as a person as I grew up. I do know that I need to learn how to practice self-love and to give myself healthy positive reinforcements.

I sometimes like to think I’m the most grateful person that I know, but truthfully, I am not. To be honest, I am still in the process of learning what it means to feel fully grateful.

Part of my own problem is that I overly extend grace to everyone out there besides myself. I most definitely have grown in my grace I have had to find for myself. I’ve also been working through forgiving myself for the things I’ve done in the past. There actually was a period of time in which I gave myself too much grace, which caused me to really hurt a lot of people in my life at the time.

It’s all about this thing that I think about all of the time, the thing I have written about numerous times, and the thing that I cannot seem to find in my life which is balance. I think my lack of self-love comes from this balance that on one side I either hate myself and become overly critical of myself. On the other side when I am too overly graceful to myself, I begin to become this selfish, mean human being.

I know I have to take steps to heal that inner child in my soul that has always felt inadequate. I spend a lot of my time reflecting on the last couple of years but realistically, my actions in the last few years were from a deeper place of pain that’s been lingering in my soul. I was never the first person chosen for a team in school. I was not the “pretty” girl in school. I had problems fitting in and making friends because I am a little awkward sometimes. I had problems accepting who I was, what I had, and what my life consisted of. I just felt…isolated, guilty, and I felt embarrassed.

I do want to take a moment to thank those people throughout my childhood who did put me down. Underneath my overwhelming sense of guilt and subconscious childhood trauma, I have discovered this level of empathy and compassion that I would never have developed without the things I have experienced throughout my lifetime. I’ve made amends with these people a while ago and to be honest, I do not believe that they intentionally meant to project their own insecurities and trauma onto me.

I unfortunately know that some (occasionally a lot) of my self-worth stems from the way others perceive me. I do have to continuously remember to repeat my favorite quote from Eleanor Roosevelt which is: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” It’s definitely a work in progress to find self-love, but a process I desperately need to continue going through in order to continue with my growth and to get the most out of my self-discovery journey has to offer me.

Every single day I am working to forgive myself and grow from the mistakes I’ve made and the things I did out of hurt. I have to acknowledge the times I non-intentionally dulled someone else’s sparkle in order to make myself sparkle. (I think we all go through this in life and it’s hard to fix.) My past actions are my biggest barriers that hold me back from self-love. I cannot and will not excuse my actions, but I can practice grace. I can pray for the strength to work through, grow from them, and to not repeat them. It’s hard, very hard. I feel like self-work might be one of the hardest mental things I’ve ever challenged myself to do. I guess I am really working to fulfill the goals in one of my words of the year which is “to challenge.”

This blog post isn’t about how I have found self-love overnight. In fact, I’m slowly learning that each and every milestone in my life is a process that takes time. I just have to have the patience to endure the challenge of putting in self-work. I know loving myself will be easier when I grow to realize that I am worthy of a life that makes me feel alive. I have to heal those inner child wounds, and those wounds definitely are deep. I know that wounds take time to heal and so do people.

One of these days I promise (to my readers, but also to myself) that I will write a blog about how I practice self-love and what self-love and self-respect mean to me. As for now, this blog is a “to be continued” type of blog. Yes, the first real post that will require a sequel. In the meantime, I’m going to continue working to change the negative self-talk into positive self-talk, and to start practicing self-care routines that are the best for me. Thank you for reading.