The Practice of Self Love Intro & Lesson One
My journey to self love is one that started shortly after my first marriage began. Probably because my first marriage was the first major life mistake I ever made. I can clearly remember Googling “How can I be happy?” or “What is the secret to happiness?” over and over again searching for the keys to contentment.
It’s not easy to talk about how much I truly hated myself 16 years ago. It makes me feel sad that I wasted so much time being so mean to me. I would stare in the mirror and tell myself outloud
“You are such a piece of shit.”
“You are so ugly.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
and sometimes I would scream
“I HAAAAAAATE YOUUUUU!!”
at the top of my lungs.
It’s probably pretty obvious, but I was so miserable that I wanted to die.
Can you imagine saying something like that to another person? There are definitely people that I hate and wonder wtf is wrong with them, but even then I would never say that to their face, no matter how many times they ripped my heart out and crushed it.
I wasn’t loaded with self esteem to begin with. In my southern middle school some of the boys called me “Chunky Chelsea.” Kids in the south are mean as shit. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was not chunky. I’ve always had curves, but I was not chunky and I believed them. There isn’t anything wrong with being chunky. I personally find women with voluptuous curves to be the most attractive. But when your 13, at a new school back in 2000, it was not meant as a compliment, so naturally I felt bad about it.
That’s just one little memory out of hundreds of experiences that made me feel undesirable. When you are made to feel ashamed of your body pretty much every single day of your entire life, you tend to be ashamed of your body. Shocker.
But fuck shame. fr.
My insecurities and self hatred were not only related to my appearance, but also to my success in school/life and my social life. I have always been a little awkward and rarely feel like I fit in with the people around me. I was critical of my success, for example I sat in the front of my graduating class because I was in the top 10% GPA for my class, but they had a top 5% (or something like that) who were in the row in front of me and I spent the whole graduation being mad at myself because I didn’t make the top 5%.
I also had some major fuck ups when I was a young adult, which made me hate myself even more. You know, “How could you be so stupid?!” Really, I wasn’t stupid, my whole psyche had been ripped to shreds and I didn’t even know it.
So, how did I turn my shit around and get my head in the right place?
Firstly, I’ll always be a work in progress and I do not have everything figured out, but I’m getting older and wiser and I wish I had someone like me now to look up to back then, so I’ve put together my most favorite and easy practices that helped me learn to love myself to share with the world over and I will posting those over the next few weeks.
Practice #1 Talk to yourself like you are talking to your best friend.
It won’t be easy and you will fuck up and piss yourself off and say mean things if you are already in that habit, but consistency is key, so just get back up on that horse and try again.
If you fucked up and forgot to pay a speeding ticket and you are feeling like a total failure because you dropped the ball. (I really did beat myself up about it.) Talk to yourself like you are talking to your bestie.
My go to used to be:
“How could you be so stupid and careless?! You could have gone to jail over this. You could have been arrested in front of your kids. (I did end up getting arrested in front of my kids eventually. I manifested it myself but that’s a blog for another day). Now you have to pay a $45 late fee on top of your $150 ticket! That could have been clothes or food. You are such a fucking loser.”
Instead say
“Girl, just go pay it now and it’ll be fine. They don’t care as long as they get your money.”
It’s so easy. Don’t make it complicated. You know that even if you felt like your best friend was being a total dumbass, you wouldn’t say it. You’d make her feel better because what does beating her up do at this point? The ticket is already late.
Make it a practice to remind yourself to speak to yourself with encouragement and respect. It’s called a practice because it will never be perfect and you will make mistakes but as long as you keep doing it, you will grow.
If this is as difficult to master for you as it was for me, try taking 5 minutes of your morning and 5 minutes before bed time to either sit in peaceful quiet and give yourself a pep talk inside your head or look in the mirror and give yourself a pep talk. I used to wait until my husband fell asleep and before I went to sleep, I gave me a pep a talk. This way, even if you just keep getting swept up in your feelings and pissing yourself off, you are still spending that time every day building yourself up, which is more than you were doing before.
I promise, if you practice this every day or even just most days, your life will change and eventually you wouldn’t ever think to speak to yourself the way you used to.
Spoiler Alert!
The next tip will involve your past self.