A few weeks ago I wrote an article on Medium, “Is self-love that important?”, and this week I realized just how important it is to really love yourself. It also can be a very challenging thing to do when your life experiences and people who don’t know how to love themselves tell you something different. In my experience I knew how to model that I loved myself publicly but privately was a completely different story.
Privately I would convince myself that people that loved me didn’t really mean to hurt me, that I’m being too sensitive, I’m overthinking situations and conversations. I would take everything personal thinking I did something wrong, that was me conditioning myself to take responsibility for others’ behaviors and ultimately people pleasing. Growing up the way I did, a lot of people often took up for me when I felt taken advantage of, which can be a good and bad thing. It was good that I always felt protected and I knew that I was always safe. It was a bad thing when learning how to use your own voice. Often, me standing up for myself came across as passive aggressive, not really knowing how to communicate my needs and lead to feeling emotionally neglected in all types of relationships. Sometimes I wouldn’t ever say anything just kind of distance myself from that person and have that person think whatever assumptions they wanted. I felt like I had the upper hand that way, because I knew I didn’t like them and in some twisted way I was trying to manipulate them into meeting a need for me, yep I know it’s really toxic and I’m not proud of it.
Truly standing up for yourself means clearly communicating your needs and giving someone the opportunity to meet them. If they aren’t willing to meet them at that moment, it doesn’t take away anything for you. It means that you’re still valuable and your needs are still important and more importantly don’t demonize someone for not meeting your needs. That person is still important and valuable just like you. I know this may not be the best analogy, it’s literally like going to Walmart to pick up Gain Clean Linen laundry detergent and they’re out of stock so you run to Target to pick it up. Does it mean you’re going to burn Walmart down? I highly doubt it.
Learning to use my voice didn’t look like what I thought it would. I always saw standing up for yourself being loud and using a lot of colorful language and often the bark was bigger than the bite. Two things I notice looking back, being loud and colorful doesn’t establish anything, it shows that you’re really loud and can curse extremely well.
After my divorce, the one thing I learned about myself is that my confidence and self love is quiet and it doesn’t mean that it’s not powerful. It’s takes a lot more resistance to remain calm and collected and at the same time letting others know what you will and won’t tolerate.
I’m still learning and unlearning quite a few things about soul love, one thing I know for sure is that it’s one of the most important skills to learn. It’s a lot like a muscle that strengthens over time and the more experiences you have the sharper they will be.
love always,
Image credit: Photo by Taylor Heery on Unsplash