This year, the ideas of self-care and self-love have been practically everywhere I've looked. From presentations to YouTube videos to simply scrolling through my feed.
While the concept is easy to understand, but it isn't always so easy in practice.
I attended a presentation on self-care a few months ago, and many of the key concepts have stuck with me since then.
Firstly, self-care looks different for everyone. There isn't a single thing that alleviates all of the stress and anxiety for every single person.
No matter what bath bombs or essential oils we come in contact with, they won't work for everyone.
Sometimes these things do work. Other times it's going on a run or writing out all your thoughts or taking a nap. No matter what your individual mechanism of self-care is, it's yours.
Another concept that hit close to home is that everyone deserves to be cared for, especially yourself. You can be at the lowest of lows or the highest of highs, but you're only human. For the longest time I have had my sole focus on others before myself, and when I allowed myself to analyze my own situation, I disregarded how I felt and shied away from dealing with it.
One of my goals this year is to love myself more. As selfish as that may sound, it is so indescribably important.
If you don't care for yourself, you won't perform to the best of your ability. Who doesn't want to put their best foot forward?
That being said, this journey is a rocky one. There is no easy way to morph the mentality and ideas about yourself that have formed over the course of your lifetime.
The process can seem slow, impossible, or even pointless at times.
The most important part is that you're trying. You're not doing this for anyone else, but for yourself: your biggest critic.
Self-determination is the key to so many things, and being comfortable with yourself is one of them. As much as our opinions of ourselves can be formed by others, the manner in which others see you is also influenced by the way in which you see and carry yourself.
Something I've come to terms with over the past few months is that your perception of situations you are in is a big determining factor in terms of how you handle them. While this applies to a plethora of things, it also applies to many aspects of your own well-being.
You hold the power to change how you see yourself and how you care for yourself. You shouldn't be afraid of it. Instead, act on it and take control.
In today's day and age, we are constantly on the go and looking for the next thing that we can do. That next project that we should be focused on is closer than we think: ourselves.
