to me, i love you

Learning to love yourself is something you will do over and over again through every phase of your life.

It’s a lifelong promise. You have to forgive every mistake, accept every flaw. Love yourself through rejection and failure and scary nights alone and bad news and bad people. You have to push yourself to and past your limits. Be brave and be exhausted. You will face every struggle with you and yourself only. You will only ever walk in your own shoes, on your own path.

Some days you won’t have love for yourself. Some days you will look at the poster on your wall of that singer you adore, and look down at yourself and wonder why your waist isn’t as skinny and why your hair isn’t as soft. Some days you’ll see other people be successful and wonder why you aren’t there. And why, at just twenty-one, you haven’t done everything with your life yet.

Some days, you will fight with the guilt of being lazy, or the awkwardness of that interaction with your friend. You will stare at a photo of yourself until you find things to hate about it, you will sit in silence thinking about how you scratched your new car. You will check your phone and wonder why they're not texting you back. Some day, someone will tell you everything you want to hear just to take it back down the road. 

You will have so many days where it feels perfectly justifiable to hate yourself. To look in the mirror and think: I don’t want to be you, or: I wish I was good enough for you.

You might think you don’t want this body. You might wish you were taller, or funnier, or had better stories to tell. You might wish those jeans still fit. Wish you could get into Frank Ocean’s music. You might wish you didn’t say things you didn’t mean. You might wish you didn’t grow up the way you did.

Sometimes you will sit and consume every form of media, clean your house, wash the car, pick up extra shifts, anything at all before you sit and have a single cohesive thought with yourself.

The journey is not easy, and that is why you will pursue it for the rest of your life.

Did you hear that right?

You have to spend your whole life with yourself. Your whole life with the you in the mirror. With that body you have, the skin you have, the thoughts you have.

You know what could be so cool about loving yourself? An infinity best friend. A kind face staring back saying, “you did the best you could today.” Gentle hands that take your makeup off and clean your skin. Thoughtful things like baths and new books and clean bedrooms. Nobody knows how to take care of you the way you do.

The cool thing about loving yourself is that you will never ever need someone else to fill the gap. Home will always be complete with you inside it. You can always count on you to show up on time, be good at your job, really enjoy your coffee, be kind to your friends. You can always trust yourself to come back from a mistake, learn from a failure, find a way to relax after a bad day.

The cool thing is also that, without even trying, the voices of people who don’t love you kind of just vanish. Because the person in the mirror thinks you’re the best, and you don’t need anyone else to prove or disprove that.

The relationship you build with yourself is complicated, and messy. It won’t be the same every day. You will have to learn to say goodbye to phases of yourself that no longer serve your goals. You will have to accept situations that alter who you are at your core. You will have to say sorry, and say thank you. You will have to love the extra skin on your tummy and your haven’t-showered-in-2-days hair.

I love myself even though I made a mistake that almost cost me a life.

I love myself because I've moved to a million cities.

I love myself even though I failed a big project at school.

I love myself especially when I listen to loud music in the car.

I love myself even when I lose my temper over little things.

I love myself if I wake up late and have to rush to work.

I love myself even if I've hurt people’s feelings and have to be brave enough to apologize.

I love myself even though the people on my sisters viral tiktok told me I was stupid (sad face).

I love myself when my favourite person says they don’t want to be with me anymore.

I love myself when I eat so much ice cream that my tummy hurts.

I love myself even when all the people around me make me feel like I’m not worth being loved.

You will find that, after practicing loving yourself, you will never have be alone again. That you will naturally resist people who can’t meet your standards, or cross boundaries. You will respect yourself beyond the validation of others.

You will look at other people who are doing and saying things you might never do or say - and it will no longer matter because they are at a different stop on their self-loving journey.

And above all else, you will feel safe knowing at the very least you have you. And nobody could take that away even if they tried (!) and if that isn’t the coolest thing you’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is.

Sometimes I get upset about people who pushed their way into my life, made me feel like they really wanted to be there, and then left. Like really, you gotta be the worst type of person. Hard truth: you can’t be mad at people for not living up to the person you thought they would be. And just because they were beautiful in your mind doesn’t mean that’s who they are. And for the record - I'm not mad at myself for believing you were better than you were, because that's who I am - a lover, who chooses to see the good in people.

But I read a quote once that stuck with me,

"How empty of me to be so full of you."

And whoever wrote that was right. I will fill my own cup. This is my job now, (really, it always has been) to fill up all the empty space that people take when they leave - and then some. Don't let other people take up so much of you. No second chances.

So, to me, I love you