Self-Love is Hard Work
Self-love is process and discipline, not bath bombs and bundles.
I think it’s best to snatch off the band-aid for this post, get to the nitty-gritty, and admit...
THIS STUFF IS HARD.
It’s easy to buy a spa day or throw money at a new wig, or a new outfit (if we have the privilege to even do those things), but it’s the days where we want to crawl in bed and cry that self-love is strengthened. I’ve shared it many times, but the absence of my father growing up and my first heartbreak really shook my foundation. No, it completely wiped it clean. I had no foundation. I was a mess.
I cried often, multiple times a day sometimes, because I felt unworthy, isolated, and sad. I became functionally depressed to the point where my family didn’t know I was battling self-doubt, low self-esteem, unworthiness, and it took me bawling in the middle of the night an embarassing amount of times to realize….this was exhausting.
It was absolutely fatiguing and it wasn’t helping me grow or become the person I know I was created to be in this world. So, I started with listening to more positive music, like this playlist, and began to build routine wellness practices.
I started small. I drank tea because I liked the process of me accomplishing something that was healthy and nourishing, and I began to make my own tea blends. Because I had fatigued myself from all the crying, mental anxiety, and worry I began taking adaptogenic herbs. Maybe, I’ll speak to those in a later post, but I literally began to create new neural pathways and patterns to raise my self-esteem.
If I had an episode of uncontrollable crying, I would talk affirmations over myself in the midst of it and probably cry harder, but was grateful because eventually that repetition seeped into my subconscious and I cried less. I had a “knowing” about me because I told myself:
“You are worthy. You are good enough. You are loved. You are love. Your past circumstances don't define you. Your heart is healed.”
Those are a few affirmations and they change as I face new opportunities to grow, but I was finding what processes worked for me to climb out my low points.
Also, I found deep joy in gaining perspective from other women who I saw doing the hard work too. I wanted to know how they found gratitude on their bad days and what they thought self-love was and how they practiced it. That was the genesis of the self-love series.
Five years in an intentional journey to loving me; I have shifted from such heavy internal work, though it's a necessary discipline for my evolution, to being the love I want to see in the world.
My heart healed, I read a loooootttt of books, like “The Four Agreements” and “Own your Own Glow” and I was ready to learn how to love my family, my friends, my co-workers, strangers, everybody in meaningful and intentional ways.
So this year speaks to the overwhelming victories I have gained from staying the course and choosing to love me every single day. Productive me, lovable me, procrastinating me, self-doubt me, “do-the-hard-work Ebony” me as well.
The folks sharing are few this year, for they are a small group who have made an incredible impact on how I love this past year. I typically chill in the background, but thought it fit for me to share what the fulfilling devotion to loving me and loving others has manifested over the past year. It’s lit.