On Friday words couldn’t express the joy I felt at being able to stay in for the night, and because my Idea of fun includes buying a lush face mask and painting my nails while watching The Real Talk show, that’s exactly what I did.
One of the segments of girl chat was when the ladies all talked about what moments in their life shaped them the most. I was personally struck by Tamera’s story and her response to what she’s faced as a person in the public eye.
This short clip put in perspective so many things for me and made me reflect upon what defines me? The weeks prior have been a roller coaster of ups and downs and rejections from so many things that I had hoped for, week after week they kept coming and even when something good happened that week all I was able to do was internalize the bad things and use that as a way to define myself. If someone looked at me the wrong way, then it was my fault for not being pretty enough or wearing the right thing. If I said something that someone didn’t like then it was my fault for not being smart enough or doing enough or working hard enough. Eventually, the feelings of not being good enough turned into anger, anger at what exactly? I wasn’t really sure but the anger was there.
After watching the clip I had to just sit for a bit to reflect and question why many of people – myself included- let external circumstances and situations define who we are and how we feel about ourselves. Why do we accept negativity and own it as part of our everyday? Shedding the negativity that cloaks us isn’t always easy to do when it seems that everything isn’t working out, but are those things what define you? Your success at a job? Or at school? it’s not bad to feel pride in these things but if they are taken away tomorrow will you still love you? Will allow yourself be defined on your own terms as a person who is kind, funny, loving, generous and most importantly as a human being worthy of love and acceptance not just from others but also from yourself?
What I also realized is that many of us don’t truly love ourselves. You may like you but do you love you? Think of someone you love genuinely and truly, would you let that person walk around knowing that they think of themselves as failures and as not being good enough or worthy of love? You wouldn’t, so why do we do that to ourselves?
We need to be free of this prison that we’ve constructed, the need for approval from people we don’t even know and the constant desires to hide who we are for fear of rejection. We need to accept and love ourselves enough to say fuck it!, this is who I am and let the rejections, failures, bad days and mean comments come as they wish but never eroding our self-love and acceptance
Deb
Thoughts?