self love

Self-love.

Self-love is loving yourself regardless of your flaws. Personally I feel like self-love is owning yourself and loving it. Knowing your strengths and working towards your weakness and loving yourself every step on the way.

When I was younger, I always battled with self-love. I was a people-pleaser. I couldn’t bear the thoughts of anyone being angry with me, I tried to make everyone like me, in every way possible. I just wanted to be in everyone’s good book. I think it had to do with the fact that I was highly in touch with my emotions but as i grew up, I realized that I didn’t love myself enough. If I loved myself enough and owned my identity I wouldn’t have given “two biscuits” about what anyone thought of me.

For the most part of high school I was bigger than all my friends. I always got teased about it. It might have been all jokes but I could have done anything to be considered normal. To just fit right in. I wasn’t outrageously big, I was just tall and I hated it so much that I went to check on the Internet "how to reduce your height"but I didn’t find any doable solutions at my young age. I hated that fact that my shoe size was an inch or two bigger than my mates. I just hated standing out in any way. I also hated the fact that my voice wasn’t as light as that of my friends. It affected me so much that the first day I got complimented about my voice I was sincerely shook to my core. Ordinarily I didn’t feel weird about myself but you know how adults just tease you about little things. Like when my civic teacher called me “giant”... Urrghh, I hated him for that…Lol.

So in different aspects of our life we might feel weird about a certain part of ourselves but I’m writing this to tell you to own that part of you and love it to the core. The irony of it all was that, in senior school I was chosen to be the general school commander for the march pass parade because of the  same voice and height.(it felt so great)  “Did I add that I was head girl….Lol”😎😎

Most times even we that think we love ourselves might just like ourselves. How do you react to yourself when you don’t achieve your goals?, when you put on a few pounds or a whole lot of pounds, when we read so hard and don’t get the expected grade?  How blunt is your inner critic?.
 In the bid to have an honest self-evaluation we end up dragging ourselves down. Control your inner voice. My math’s teacher in secondary school had this carrot and stick technique. She uses one hand to scold us (stick) then boost us up with the other hand (carrot). So in as much as you’re correcting yourself don’t bring yourself down in the process.

I’m not trying to say you should accept anything less from yourself because I love myself the way I am and try to do better.

Let’s practise more self-love today TBL.NG squad. I love you.

#TBL.