Self-Love Is About Accepting Your Negatives, But Celebrating Your Positives Too

Self-love is often propagated as a word that means accepting your flaws. It is indeed very important to learn to love and cherish your flaws and heck, even celebrate them before you can come anywhere close to the concept of self-love. But self-love isn’t just that. That is just one side of the coin.

Self-love is also about accepting and celebrating your perfections as much as you celebrate the imperfections.

Self-love is about accepting a genuine compliment with grace and realizing that we indeed deserve it. It is funny how much self-confidence we lack these days. Even with the things that we are good at, we often doubt ourselves when others point out how good we are at it.

Self-love is making a conscious effort to realize your strengths and using them to move forward in the journey of life.

Self-love is about having confidence that we are worthy of better things in life, not because we are entitled, but because we are ready to work hard for them. Of course, our confidence won’t always be at peak height. There will be days when we will doubt ourselves and be unsure of the way forward. And yet, we choose to believe that if we work hard and with passion, the universe will one day fall in love with our stubborn heart.

Self-love is knowing that winning isn’t always important and that sometimes it is the experience of the journey that is far more interesting than the destination itself. Self-love is knowing that choosing your peace of mind is far more important that sticking with situations and people that are driving you insane. Walking away from toxic people and relationships is not selfish, it is self-love. It takes a lot of courage to put your feet down and say no to something or someone you once held dear.

Self-love is being kind to yourself on days when everything seems to be falling apart. Taking a break and doing something that you genuinely enjoy to cheer yourself up instead of finding ways to tear your already tired soul apart, are ways of healing based on self-love. Be as gentle and patient with yourself as you are with your loved ones during their difficult times. You need that. You deserve that.

Self-love is also knowing and accepting that you are a part of this huge universe. You carry within yourself the potential to light up a whole solar system, if not the galaxy.

You were sent here with a specific purpose. This purpose could be something phenomenal like leading a country-wide movement to remove racism like Martin Luther King Jr. or something simple, yet vital like being a super-mom whose world revolves around her family and career ambitions. And because you carry a part of the universe within you, the universe will always have your back. It won’t deny you something that is healthy for you or something that will help you grow and push you forward in this journey of self-discovery.

Our eyes give us the ability to see the actions of others – their kindness, their struggles, their hope, their dreams, their success stories, their failures and their never dying fighting spirit. We were given the ability to look at others but never to look at ourselves – probably because if we look at ourselves, we will be far more concerned about our external appearance than the story that we carry within ourselves.

Self-love is like the mirror that shows us the reflection of our soul. But like any mirror, we need to keep cleaning it regularly with courage, confidence, faith, humility and kindness so that we can see the reflection of our journey so far clearly.

Self-love is accepting every chapter and every phase of our life and the way it molds us into the person we have become, while realizing that we always hold the power to change it anytime we choose to. While realizing that we are a small yet crucial piece of the big jigsaw puzzle that this universe is.