One of the things I really wanted to focus on this year was more self-love, but here we are more than halfway through the year and I still haven’t made this a priority. I can make a ton of excuses as to why I have let this slip through the cracks. I mean let’s face it, adulting and parenting are hard. Working full time, taking care of kids, managing schedules, paying bills, running here, running there are just so tiring. It’s hard to fit thinking and focusing on one’s self in there, but it’s a must.

Now, when I say self-love I am talking about the feed your soul kind of love not the looking in the mirror and telling myself I’m beautiful kind of love. I know that’s important too, trust me, I’d love to look in the mirror and appreciate my face and body with all of their flaws, but it’s just not what I need the most in my life at this moment. I’ll work on that when I’ve mastered the inner part of self-love.

The inner part of self-love. What does that even mean? Well, to me it means loving and accepting yourself – past, present, and future. We all have chapters in our lives that we’d rather not re-read. We need to learn to accept those chapters and make peace with them. They may not be any of our shining moments, but they were lessons learned. We’ve all had moments of self-doubt when we’ve put ourselves down. We need to apologize to ourselves; we deserve better. We need to believe in ourselves and stop worrying about what others might think. We’ve all hurt someone in the past. Whether that person was ourselves or someone else we really need to forgive ourselves for it. Forgiving is one step closer to healing and healing leads to peace. We also need to be ready to cut ourselves some slack in the future. We’ll mess up. I’m sure we’ll have moments when we slip back into the bad habits we are trying to break. Guess what? It’ll be okay. We’re all just doing the best we can and if we slip we’ll just have to get back up and try again.

I truly believe that we heal from the inside out and my thought is that once we accept all of those internal things, everything that makes us who we are, we can learn to love ourselves. Getting to that point will be hard, but once we are there we’ll be free to devote time to loving our external selves – you know, like learning to love the way your thighs fill out your jeans or the bump on your nose.

Today will mark day one of my self-love journey. I think a good start is picking one thing that I don’t like about myself and finding something good about it. Anyone else with me? Is anyone else ready to devote some much needed energy into loving yourself? I am hoping by putting this out there it’ll reach others just like me who are lacking in the self-love department, but want to get better at it. Anyway, whatever self-love means to you, whether you need to start internally or externally, please just do it. You need to love you.

I’m going to leave you with this quote from Sophia Bush that I loved. “If I could talk to my younger self, I would say, “Stop worrying so much about being somebody else’s definition of enough. Because you already are.”