Falling Back In Love with Myself
It’s mid-summer and has been about half a year since I’ve blogged. So much has happened since then, both positive and negative, happy and sad. Right now, I’m going to write about falling back in love with myself, finding happiness, and becoming that badass person I used to be.
The things that have happened in my life this semester, now looking in retrospect, caused me to lose the confidence, trust, and security I had in myself when I started the year. I came in to the year confident in who I was, what I wanted, what I deserved and somehow I lost sight of that. Though personal growth and life are sure to change those aspects of me, it got to the point where I found myself holding back a part of who I was because I wanted to be accepted and liked and that’s not okay.
It’s hard to now look back and realize that I had become the opposite of what I was, what I stood for, and it wasn’t necessarily for the better. Yes, I learned to let go/go with the flow, trying so hard to please someone, but at what cost of myself, my morals, my identity? I never was quite the person to search for validation or to “fit in” to be liked by others. I marched to my own beat – my mindset like the song goes, “take me baby, or leave me”. Bending to what others want from me or what I believe I should be is not who I am.
Again, I find myself struggling to find the independent, strong, confident woman that I used to be with the addition of the lessons I have learned this year. To be that “badass” that I felt in being secure in my beliefs and self.
I will admit, it’s not easy. It took me all of high school to be confident in and to know who I am. But since I’ve been through it all before, I see no reason why I should struggle to do it again.
It all starts with getting out of bed. I can sit and mope all I want; I could, as a country song goes, “tape it back together with a whisky and coke”, but what good does that do? Normally I give myself a couple of days to do just lie in bed, to evaluate and reassess, but I know deep, deep down that I need to keep busy. The more I sit, the more I think, and the more I think the more I over analyze and that can get toxic. I need to get up off my ass and do the things that I want to do. Treat myself to the things that I not only need, but may want. I need to start doing things for ME and living in the now instead of thinking about the past and the what ifs that come associated with it.
Things such as checking out the local coffee shops, exploring the city, reading a book, working out (get yourself some endorphins!), going to the farmer’s market, hanging with friends keep me busy and not only distract me, but make me happy because they are all things that I want to do. I listen to music, dance it out, and make a plan going forward. Doing things that make me happier makes me more confident. Happiness attracts happiness just as positivity attracts positive things and you bet karma will make its appearance.
Finally, and this is the most difficult part of it all, I recognize and accept that everything happens for a reason – the universe has a plan and everything will fall in to place at the right moment. Many times I think “why me?”, “why now?”. There is a reason someone came in to my life, there is a reason I experienced the things I did and that is perfectly okay. The phrase goes, “it’s either a blessing or a lesson” and let me tell you, the lessons, no matter how hard, made me who I am today and opened my eyes to the possibilities of tomorrow.
I am still working on falling back in love with myself and finding happiness, as it does not come easy, but I hope that the way I go about doing so may help others.
