self-love is a journey

This post originally appeared as a guest-post on the blog of a friend from Instagram who is also writing about self-love and finding your true authentic self so I decided that I should post it on my blog as well.

In our society we should talk more openly about mental health and self-love since these are topics many people struggle with tremendously from my experience. Therefore I made it a topic of my blog because I had been struggling with loving myself for a very long time and the more I talk to other people, the more I realise that there are so many others out there struggling as well. 

The good news is, you can learn to love yourself, as long as you are willing to do some inner work; you can learn to shift your mindset from not accepting and loving yourself to finally accepting, respecting and loving yourself. You can learn to give yourself the love that you give to other people  You can learn to form new daily habits and patterns that are based on treating yourself with the utmost care, love and respect. Of course all of this takes time and effort but it is totally worth it because it will make your life so much better and the way you feel about yourself. Self-love is a journey and a learning experience. You can wake up one morning and decide to love yourself and if you have not loved yourself before then now is the time to learn to love yourself and to start this personal journey to happiness. I didn't even realise how much harm I did to myself with my behaviour before I started diving into the world of personal-development and self-love. 

For me self-love means to set healthy boundaries, to get out of situations/jobs/relationships etc. that make me feel unwell. Self-love means getting outta stuck. Self-love means to take extremely good care of yourself, of your physical and emotional health. In order to love yourself you should stop people-pleasing, living up to the expectations of others and of course stop any kind of behaviour that does not support your emotional and physical health. You should get to know yourself much better, figure out what you want from life, find out what makes you happy and how you can support your wellbeing on a daily basis through habits and patterns that make you feel peaceful, calm and energised. Through the journey of self-love you will burn bridges with people who were toxic for a long time already but you could not see that before, you will leave jobs that made you feel miserable and move on to work that better suits your wellbeing and also your daily habits and patterns are likely to change. 

In my 20ies I used to be quite a party-animal even though that was something that never supported my emotional wellbeing and later on I realised that instead of going out, staying up late, drinking too much alcohol - an act of self-love was to start my blog, to get back into design (I studied design but completely changed industries after finishing design school), to dive deep into the world of self-development, entrepreneurship, design and spirituality. So instead of going out and staying up late the weekends, I started designing for my blog, writing blog posts about self-love, self-development, I started to go to bed early to make sure I get enough sleep and rest and to find a way of eating that makes me feel well. An act of self-love was to accept my autoimmune issues (I have Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis) and to accept that I have to live differently than someone who is truly healthy so which in my case means that getting enough sleep and rest is essential and eating a way that supports my hormonal health and my immune system is non-negotiable in order to feel well and healthy. 

So, I want to give each one of you who is struggling hope, that if I made it to learn to love myself after many years of health issues, dark episodes of depression and eating disorders, that if I made it to to learn to better love and to accept myself, to change my patterns to a self-loving and me-supporting lifestyle, then you my friend can make it as well as long as you are willing to work on yourself and to change your mindset, habits and patterns. 

Lots of love,

Phyllis