Stop telling yourself you’re not good enough. Stop thinking you’re less. Stop walking around with your head to the ground, picking at every flaw, focusing on every deficiency, making a list of wrongs just to tape it to your chest and label yourself as unworthy.
Stop blaming yourself for every failure in love, for every person who’s walked away, for every connection that’s fallen flat. Stop thinking that there’s something wrong with you, simply because a relationship drifted or wasn’t meant to be.
Stop speaking words of negativity to yourself at the end of the day, wishing to be someone else, someone better, someone prettier or stronger or faster or more confident or more loveable. Stop spinning your mind on a constant loop of all the things you’ve failed, all the people you’ve lost, all the words you should have said but didn’t.
Stop hanging onto regrets and fears and mistakes and thinking that’s your self-definition.
Stop breaking your own damn heart.
The world is too big, too messy, too cruel for you to be your own worst enemy, to burden yourself before anyone else does, to blame and point fingers and live in a constant pool of what could have been.
The world is filled with far too many people who will love you, appreciate you, cherish you, for you to be focusing on the few that won’t.
This world is moving too quickly to look back at all the things and people you’ve lost, to feel as if you’ll never reach the next step, to think that this frustrating moment is all there is.
It’s time to quit looking backwards, quit talking poorly to yourself before you fall asleep at night, quit believing the lies around your self-worth and self-love.
It’s time to see yourself as the wonderfully complex being you are—flawed but original, imperfect but beautiful.
It’s time to smile at the mistakes you’ve made because they’ve become lessons of strength. It’s time to stand tall in the face of regret and fear because those moments have defined you. It’s time to laugh at the past and look forward with a full spirit.
It’s time to stop breaking your heart and build it instead.
Build it with words of love and encouragement. Build it with hope and forward-thinking. Build it with forgiveness and blessings and positivity for all the lessons you’ve learned.
Build it with perseverance in the face of frustration. Build it with kindness and gentleness and softness that the world doesn’t always give. Build it with love.
And watch as you learn to let people in, as you learn to release pain, as you learn who you are and have always been. Watch as you realize you’ve always been whole and worthy and stronger than you think. Watch as you bloom.