Dreamer

Happy Sunday evening, dreamers!
I hope you had an amazing weekend and you are recharged for the upcoming week.

Tonight I want to talk with you about a truly important topic: self-love.

No, you’re not in therapy. You are still in a safe place, a lifestyle blog where we talk about goal-achievement, time management, recipes, travel, now fashion, and overall, different experience.

And one of the advantages of you being in a safe space, in my safe space, is that I can give you the short-cuts for the lessons I lived and learned.

Many times, I found myself in the position of prioritizing anyone else but me, choosing for their benefits even if it wasn’t my benefit, setting my personal goals to satisfy their needs.

And of course, later on, that course, I failed, I felt drained, I felt sad and unsatisfied on all the sides of my life.

For example, last year I set some amazing goals, and after just a few weeks of putting pressure on others’ expectations and needs I burned out. Like, for 4 months I was a mess without any desire to do anything.

Fast forward in that direction, after a few mistakes and let’s say lessons unveiled, I started to learn them.

It wasn’t a solo effort, I had help, but here is one of the lessons I learned.

You can’t love anyone or anything if you don’t love yourself. Yeah, it sounds like a cliche, and whenever I heard it before I burst into laughs.

But, now I understood that loving myself is an amazing journey, amazingly hard at the same time.

So, the first step in this journey is to trust your gut when it comes to the moment of a revelation, the second is to be open to learning your lections. As a hint, is a moment when you’ll find yourself in the position of don’t know where you’ve done wrong when you’re relationships, and generally, your whole life is falling apart.

For me, it was in September, when my family relationships, my friends, my relationship, and my values were literary falling apart.

It was my fault, from the beginning. I tried to hide my emotions, my needs, my desires to make everyone around me happy. I know that all started in my childhood, with some little traumas, like not being wanted in differents play-teams in kindergarten, or sometimes getting bullied by classmates in my first school years, used by my so-called friends for my brain.

I didn’t want to accept them as traumas because, well I thought that they made me soft, and I needed to be strong for my family who tried to overcompensate the fact that I was fatherless, and that was all I could do.

So, over the years I ignored them and tried to bury them underneath a mask of overconfidence, false assumption, and a desire for independence.

It was a matter of time and poor choices until they blew out on my face.

And they did, and I still try to recover after. But I learned my first lesson, I learned that I have to embrace and grow who I am, and that’s the full picture, the things that I love about me, my strong points, the face I show to the world, but also my weak spots, the things that made me who I am today, my previous version of myself, the one version about me that I only know about.

The second lection I learned was that I need to value myself despite my flaws and to grow my self-esteem. We all have things we don’t like about ourselves. Many of us strive for perfection, even though, logically we know it’s not achievable because it’s different for everyone. In that case, when things don’t go as planned, we like to punish ourselves. Also, naturally, we are tempted to compare ourselves and our work with others, and always the grass will be greener on the other side. So, I decided to change this, and honestly, I did it with help, and the help of the next question “Who could do it better than me?”. Also, I learn to say thanks and not be shy when I get compliments, with a smile on my face. I also, allow myself to look my best, as long as I am comfortable with myself, no matter if I am overdressed or underdressed.
The last two things that helped me change to focus on my person were to use more I instead of we and writing practice.
Basically, when I would love something about myself, I would write it down on my phone, in a notebook, or whatever.
It did take a while, and I am still working, sometimes failing, but I’m not giving up, and that’s what’s important, that creates a result to a journey.

Lesson number three? Limits!
Many of us, in the run to be liked and accepted and integrated, don’t set limits. And this ends up with, working more hours without benefits, finding yourself at events or surrounded by people that drain you, postponing your goals for other people’s tasks.
So, start saying NO! There’s no guide to it, no practice, just, again, your gut.

Lesson four: cut out what brings you down. This is an extension of lesson number three. Basically, ask yourself if a person, a thing, an action, a place helps you become someone better, helps you achieve your goals or not? If not, start cutting the strings that connect you. For me, that means avoiding some family members and also, keeping on a class-mates level some friends, viewing Ig stories with others and so on.
You’ll see if you are focused on your goals, you won’t even realize when the ruptures took place.

Five. Well, here’s so far I’ve got. But, making a comparison to 12 months back me, now, I don’t feel guilty for my emotions, I know that I have what it takes to pursue my goals and achieve them, I know that, at the end of the day, I am a good person, with good intentions and it’s normal to have expectations, some high ones. It’s normal to expect at least as much as I give and that I’ll manage to survive if I choose to take a step back when my needs aren’t fulfilled. I know that failing isn’t making me less worthy of love and appreciation. Now, I know that I don’t have to lie to myself and that’s the key to self-love.

#adremerlife

Crissu