Self Love Will Change Your Life.
Freshman year of college I moved into a single dorm room directly next door to my best friend of all time. Four years of college ahead of me felt terrifying but exhilarating. Meeting new people, going to parties, hooking up, falling in love. I was ready to dive into it all and thrive in my major.
Except that I deeply, unconditionally, hated myself.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this self hatred was layers deep. I was trapped at all ends.
I don’t know if you’ve ever pulled your hair or slapped yourself in the face out of self hatred, but just know that if you have, you’re not crazy. It will stop one day. Your heart will lighten, your hands will stop themselves.
You do not deserve that.
The first time I realized that maybe I hated myself was my senior year of high school, when my history teacher gave me a book called “Love Yourself (Like Your Life Depends On It)”. The image on the front is a man holding a gun to his head. How could my teacher see this but not me?
He knew I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to make enough money to one day have a theater room in my home. He also knew that I doubted myself; that I thought I was dumb, incapable, and ugly. I think he’s an empath, but I also think that these were feelings that radiated from me, making it hard for people to love me the way I desperately wanted to be loved. This was part of the problem.
Fast forward two years. I moved back home from my dorm room, I weighed in at almost 200lbs, I changed my major. The hair pulling continued, I would sob into the mirror, I would tell myself face to face how much I despised myself.
It was toxic, and almost addicting, and if I’m honest it felt like an excuse to not be moving forward in life, in my relationships, and in my health. So I decided to finally read the book.
This book sat on my shelf, untouched, for almost two years. I didn’t realize that when I received it, I just wasn’t ready to read it yet. I didn’t think about it. I just picked it up and went outside and read all of the 50 pages in an hour.
“The truth is to love yourself with the same intensity you would use to pull yourself up if you were hanging off a cliff with your fingers. As if your life depended upon it.” -Kamal Ravikant
Kamal Ravikant, the author, promised me that falling in love with myself would change everything, my whole world. And on top of that, he promised that it was relatively easy.
I don’t think I was ever depressed. I wasn’t unmotivated in school, I didn’t spend days in bed, I didn’t feel a darkness looming over me everywhere I went. But Kamal did.
He talks about his businesses that thrived and then failed, how he made a lot of money and lost it all, how his relationships failed, how he literally would not move from underneath the covers of his bed. And all he did to pull himself out of his hole was repeat “I love myself” over and over and over again.
If you’re conscious, it should be a constant stream of thought. And when it starts to fade, acknowledge that you’re thinking about something else, and start again.
If he could do it in a world of pure darkness, then so could I.
So I did. I started that day. From the moment I woke up to the moment I fell asleep I was thinking “I love myself I love myself I love myself.” A constant loop.
I would say it out loud in my car, in the shower, and whenever I was alone. I would look at myself in the mirror, in my eyes, and say it out loud. You don’t know how vulnerable that is until you do it.
It made me cry, multiple times, staring at myself desperate to fall in love.
I meditated for the first time in my life. I found a classical song that I loved on Youtube that was 7 minutes long. For that 7 minutes I would sit in my dark room, picturing only light and a galaxy of illuminating stars. With every inhale, “I love myself.” And with every exhale, every negative, degrading, and just plain untrue thought was exhaled too.
It’s okay if thoughts of how ugly you are, or how fat you are, or how you just don’t love yourself or even like yourself come to your brain. You just have to let them exit with each breath.
You don’t have to like yourself to love yourself. It’s important to know that. Loving yourself is not the same as loving someone else.
You don’t have to get to know yourself, find yourself attractive, or think that you’re interesting or worthwhile to fall in love with yourself. It’s actually the opposite. Those feelings start to come naturally when you love yourself.
It took three months (only three!) for my life to change. I was kinder, happier. I lost 20 pounds. I no longer had high blood pressure. I could get dressed without only seeing how disgusting I looked. I could do my makeup without wishing I had different features.
I stopped hitting myself.
It’s been four years since this happened. I love myself more deeply than I could have ever imagined when I was 17. The best part about it is that it constantly changes and evolves. I love myself in new ways every day. When I struggle to feel beautiful, it’s easy to forgive myself.
That’s the biggest change, and probably the most important. Self love leads to self forgiveness.
You learn to forgive yourself for being so harsh. You learn to let go of your mistakes and learn from them. You learn to be gentler to your body; the way you see it and care for it. You become more mindful of the food you eat and forgive yourself for eating fried food and ice cream and processed sugar every day.
You start to heal. You start to radiate love and forgiveness, and that attracts people to you.
You learn when you’re in a cycle of bad habits, and instead of feeling trapped and frustrated, you forgive and learn how to get yourself out. You start taking care of yourself in all aspects of life. You start saying nice things to yourself as often as you say mean things.
It’s not an end-all cure. You’re not going to become the person you’ve always wanted to be automatically. It’s always a process, and there is always more to learn and more to do. But if there is anywhere that you should start, this should be it.
Fake it until you make it. You will get there. Every step gets easier after that.
