Self-Love

 Self-love is not enough. Self-love is complicated because there are moments we lose ourselves due to pleasing others, failing our goals, and fear of showing our real selves. We will have moments where we hate, blame, and criticize ourselves. It will not be the fastest, but it is beneficial to take your time to love, including your soul as first priority, and take care of yourself.

   Self-love not only means loving yourself, but loving your soul, heart, human body systems, house, body type, pride, ethnicity, posessions, and passions. Why is self-love important? Because if you do not love yourself first, you will lose your real self as you love others first, considering to be a passive-aggressive form of selfishness. 

   1. Stop comparing yourself to other people. 

       You are who you are. Everybody has different stories that make them who they are, so are you. Everybody has their own talents, ambitions, and backgrounds, including you. Everybody is great in their own way when it comes to circumstances. You will experience meeting people who will be in different levels. It is dangerous to your physical and mental health if you continue to compare yourself to others, including a headache, social anxiety disorder, and depression. It is beneficial to say "I can do it," but try not to brag where it becomes egocentric. 

  2. Don't worry about how you are viewed by others

    Yes, we all are conscious about having muscular, curvy, slim-thick, skinny, or fit bodies, dressing up in bright-colored, elegant clothing, or buying expensive merchandises to show off to please others. If you continue to make them happen instead of doing genuinely for yourself, you will likely to experience symptoms of anorexia nervosa, depression, histrionic personality disorder, narcisstic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder or personality disorder. You will also experience low genuine self-esteem, level of happiness, poor coping skills, and more forms of aggression: relational and instrumental aggressions. \Yet, you can't always make everybody joyful because if you do, you are wasting yourself and your own times. You have many other times to go and the right to stand up for yourself in your own way. You have time to explore and find your true identity, but it will not always be "achievement:" individual has explored alternatives and has deliberately chosen a specific identity, one of the identity statuses defined by James Marcia. 

3. Allow yourself to make mistakes and fail

   We are all told that nobody is perfect. Despite whoever tells you to be perfect, they have flaws just like you. It is alright to set high expectations and check make sure you are not making mistakes, but you can't expect yourself to be perfect in everything you do. You fail exams, tests, quizzes, projects, classes, classworks, and games, despite how hard you work. Failure is part of growth and success. Invest your time in yourself, including your strengths, weaknesses, and everything else. You have chances to better yourself. You have chances to create more stories, so please take your time to learn, work out, and grow from them there and out. 

4. Practice self-kindness

   It is not just one day you are progressing yourself. You have hobbies and desires that will help you practice self-kindness. For example, 

• Read books, holy scriptures, and other texts online or in-paper:
• Helps you to connect to your other side of your own world
• Apply life lessons inside and outside of your world
• Develop empathy for yourself and others.
• Pray
• It is great to pray for help, but pray to appreciate your religion for contributing to your life.
• Play sports and exercise where you are not competing against yourself and others: 
• Exericse and increased motor skills 
• Develop self-esteem & initiative 
• Learn social skills & cooperation 
• Use cognitive skills in practical ways 
• Pamper for yourself enough with items, but save your finances: 
• Make your life emotionally stable, despite how hard life would be.
• Feed your nervous system
• Get professional help
• On the other hand, saving your finances helps to...
• Give more freedom.
• Take calculated risks
• Develop safety net during hard times
• Work flexibility
• Do arts and crafts: Despite being viewed as risky at the same time, they help...
• Express yourself with different art and hardware materials, such as hammer, pencil, clay, paper, and paintbrush.
• Increase individuality
• One of the best ways to create your identity, going from diffusion: indiviudal is overwhelmed by a task of achieving an identity and does little to accomplish the task, to achievement. 
• Picture your inner and outer thoughts and visions with...
• Form: Element of art describing mass and volume or the three dimensional aspects of objects that take up space.
• Context: Settings, conditions, circumstances and occurrences affecting production and reception or audience response to an artwork.
• Content: Purpose and meaning

   5. Don't be Scared to Let Go of Toxic People

       Things will change in times. There are relationships you maintain. There are other relationships you struggle to maintain and end because of lack of social skills, betrayal, co-rumination, unwilling to compromise or negotiate, and/or changing interests. People will come into your life and then leave. You won't like everybody, and not everybody will like or feel close to you. They don't mean you are or will be a bad person. You have the right to go out on a date for and develop a romantic relationship with yourself. If you keep thinking about the bad side of how you have been treated by yourself, you will likely to have depression, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, suicidal thoughts, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Even though what they are doing is hurtful to you based on your memory and perspective, you have other friends to befriend with and chances to love and make up for yourself, things that you lost. Yet, you can't expect yourself to change who they are. You will regret wasting time on the future and past instead of the present. You are here to change yourself first, let go of them, and slowly move on from them, despite how sad they can be. It is best to focus to where you are now. 

   6. Remember your value doesn't define on how you are viewed.

   We all want to look beauteous and Gucci in front of others, yet denying your racist, sexist, and heteronormative biases perpetuates systemic inequality. You are beautiful, smart, and talented in your own way, not because of your body, talents, and background. If you place your fears, insecurities, jealous moments, and limitations on others, you will create suffering for yourself and others. It is okay to suffer, but you have the time to learn and make them up. There are times you will not know the answer and understand exactly what people are thinking and feeling, but your behavior matters. Do not lie about what you say and do. They will be shown every single day. The ball is on the game. It is up to you to think, choose, say, do, and perform. 

People-pleasing will not earn you any respect. If you keep following others' expectations, you will not win. That's why self-love is here in our lives. You have chances to practice self-love. Do not compare too much about your progress now and back then because you will end up overthinking and still lose yourself! Start your own day, do your own thing, and be the realest self. Stop forcing yourself to be the best version of yourself! You will end up not respecting your independence, values, and principles. Self-love is part of what makes your life different and unique.