I’m only realizing in the second half of my life that I’ve always loved myself. That feels kind of icky to read and admit but stay with me for a while.

Growing up and for much of my teenage years I thought I had poor self esteem and self image. This manifested a lot of the time as perfectionism trying to be the “best” I could be. I was very hard on myself in every situation and overly critical of my shortcomings. I also constantly felt like I wasn’t attractive and didn’t feel good about my appearance. Even if people told me I was beautiful I felt uncomfortable because I didn’t believe it. But you know what’s wild? I’m sitting here in my bed and it’s raining outside and it finally dawned on me. I don’t think I ever truly felt this way about myself. I think because I was so bullied and so unaccepted in a lot of situations growing up I lost the love and confidence I had in myself and replaced it with what other people said about me and how they treated me. At some point it became who I felt I was and I lost the love I once had for myself. I began to believe this is how I always felt instead of being able to identify where that lie began to take root and grow.

It’s hard to believe all of that now because I feel so sure of myself and who I am but this is something I carried for so long. I truly believed for many years that there was something fundamentally wrong with me and I was not good enough. The reason so many bad things happened no matter how hard I tried to be perfect to avoid them reinforced this. I brought this up in therapy not that long ago and phrased it loosely like this: “If the perfect version of me was still not enough – how bad was the imperfect/real version of me to other people?”

Wherever you find yourself in the journey of self-love or self-acceptance I hope you can fully identify and own where you are even if it’s not pretty. Because I promise – one day you will be somewhere you never thought you would be and you’ll be confident in the person that you are.