Self Love Take 2

It’s hard looking at everyone getting everything you’ve always hoped for. It’s hard seeing people with the body, or face, or anything someone else has that you wish you possessed.

Social media is an incredible platform in multiple ways, yet when I try to use it that way I often times feel disheartened.

There’s so much exposure through social media. You get to peek into everyone’s lives and judge based on what you perceive. Everyone’s a victim to it, there’s no denying that. Some people just handle the idea of perception better than others.

Awhile back I wrote an article about self love in the age of social media. This is a fresher take on that.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m the first person to claim self acceptance while I simultaneously suck in my stomach in photos of myself. Okay maybe not the first one ever, but it’s something I find myself doing all. the. time. I’m never satisfied with my body, or my image.

I scroll and I scroll through thousands of photos of beautiful people of all shapes and sizes. All skin types and colors. Yet as I say to myself how incredible these people look, I stare at myself with a form of hatred one only grows from within.

I’m not here to tell you to love yourself, because it’s hard. I know it’s hard. But if you’re trying then at least you’re doing better than me.

I may portray a life of self love and acceptance, and recovery, but deep down I know there are many things I’d change about my appearance and my past. Who out there doesn’t have something they wish were different in life?

Overall, I guess I’m trying to say that there is no timeline or guidebook on how to love yourself. It’s something you’ll stumble through for the rest of your life. Falling in holes and then digging yourself out of them, just to fall back in again. A cycle of highs and lows.

There are many things in life I wish I had that I don’t. There are many things in life I wish I could change but I can’t. This life was meant to be played out the way it has for a reason, and if I keep telling myself that then one day I’ll believe it, and maybe then I’ll find peace in a body I have hated for so long.

Bailey