An Open Letter To The Women Who Don’t Love Themselves Enough
It’s hard to feel loved, to be loved, and to love ourselves. Especially when all we have experienced is cruelty by the ones who we thought loved us enough. However, they made us feel like we are not good enough. We start believing those lies, the lies that say we can’t do anything without them or that we’re worthless. Those words cut through us like a knife. It’s only going to get worse if we don’t practice self-love. We need to say to ourselves that we are good enough, we are loved, we are worth everything.
Self-love is the most important thing, especially when it comes to our mental health. It is honestly the only thing that keeps us sane. When we are feeling hurt or have been the subject of someone’s word vomit or have sacrificed our freedom for them to just take advantage of it and never give it back to us, that’s when we need self-love the most. Self-love is the key to a woman’s happiness and well-being. It keeps us from spiraling out of control when in a compromising drunken and vulnerable state.
The honest to God truth is that when we feel hurt, we numb the pain and succumb to it with copious amounts of liquor. We also stoop as low as we need to to stop the intoxicatingly painful trauma we experience. We fear that nobody will be able to love us at our worst or our best. But it’s with the empowering motivation that we face the world and say, “I am loved.”
When we say those words “I am loved,” our body feels them, our mind consumes them, and our hearts embrace them. We no longer will stand for someone trying to tear us apart and bring us down low to the ground where we are pleading on our knees to let someone love us or for the pain to go away. We pray that every negative thought will go away. And it will in time. But always remember that when it gets hard, we have to not be so tough on ourselves. As women, we are confined to feeling one emotion. We can’t feel anything else but sadness or depression.
Society makes us believe that we can never be happy or feel loved without someone and that we must depend on one person to make us feel that way. We depend on no one and nothing to love who we are.
In a world full of fake, there are flaws, and we all have them. That’s what self-love is about. Self-love is accepting our permanent flaws, even if they are bruises that are hidden beneath our skin and all we want is to get rid of them. As we accept those flaws, we begin to love ourselves again. We try to forget about the cruel jabs and jokes that are on our minds. We make them disappear and learn to accept what we can’t change.
The best thing to do is to love ourselves through positive affirmation and silence the world about what it means to be a woman and feel what we want to feel, regardless of the outcome. It can feel very lonely and isolating sometimes when you’re trying to go through something and then you feel as if your whole world is falling apart and there’s nothing you can do but try to come to terms with it.
In the end, self-love can help you feel human again, and all you have to do is hope that everything will be okay. Everything will be, as long as you don’t allow yourself to become riddled with guilt or shame about feeling sad.
Remember, it’s okay to not be okay. And, it’s okay to love yourself, even when you feel everything and everyone is against you. Just know that everything happens for a reason. Love who you are and everything that you have accomplished. Love yourself even if it hurts. Love yourself, but with more patience and kindness.
If we love ourselves through rose-colored glasses, then maybe we can improve the way we see ourselves. We can finally be able to see ourselves in a better light, that we are beautiful and worthy of just being. We are worthy of being who we are without shame or judgment from others or from our self-sabotaging harmful words we say to ourselves.
We can write on the wall and send ourselves a little bit of a reminder. We say, “Dear self, you are good enough for someone else to fall in love with. You are good enough to care about, to be kind to, to hold, to be a writer, to be a lawyer, to empower other women, to be an activist, a dancer, a singer, a doctor, an actress, or even a fashion designer or model. You are good enough to be touched, to be talked about in the most respectful of ways, to be seen and heard. And most importantly, for someone to call you their wife or girlfriend.”
Don’t worry about what others think of you. Only you know what you are and what you are not. Believe it. Remind yourself of those words: “I am loved.”
You don’t need to have anyone’s approval to love yourself. Self-love has no boundary, no dependency attached to it. It’s all about independence and finding yourself again within that love you provide to yourself. You can no longer feel imprisoned by your silent pain.
You can no longer depend on that pain to give you what you need to survive. Feel the love inside of you and let it guide you into a world full of possibilities. You are so much more than what you think you are. You deserve all the love in the world. Most importantly, you are worth the sky and the moon. Self-love is about knowing your worth and self-acceptance. Before you can ever love someone, you have to be able to love yourself unconditionally. It’s also about self-discovery.
Discover who you are, what you want, and who you want to share your life with. And while you do that, remember you are free to say and feel whatever you want. No one can take that away from you unless you let them.
Love yourself with all your heart. Then take that love and give it to your daughter, sisters, niece, and make sure to remind them that they are loved and good enough.