Be Kind to Yourself and Celebrate Your Strength

Good morning, everyone and happy Sunday! I’m hoping to spend time with my family today and get back to myself. The older I get the more I try not to forget where I came from. I had the best childhood, and I love my family so much.

As I’ve been living on my own for many years now, I have made friends who have become like family to me; a second family, a second home.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we, as humans, are living two separate realities; there’s the version of us that we show to the world, the version that is all smiles, the version that nods and says, “I’m fine.”  And then there’s the version we keep hidden, the version we don’t want anyone to know about, the version that struggles, doubts ourselves, is worried, scared and loses sleep. One thing that I’m truly grateful for is having several close friends who I can be myself around. I didn’t use to have so many confidantes in my life, people I could trust with my worries and fears. Along with that, however, there are people who you think you can trust but turns out they have an agenda to use you and take advantage. It’s important to know the difference and to know who you can really trust before you open-up to them.

Before we share our hopes, dreams, and struggles with others, it’s important to know ourselves first. We’re all walking around wearing this armor, this mask, that we believe will protect us from hurt; but the truth is, we all hurt.

We all struggle; we all have messes in our lives that we have to struggle and survive. Along with us living our two different realities, we are also bombarded on a daily basis with social media and the lie that people living online are perfect. They’re all rich, they’re all beautiful, they’re all pain-free and thriving! When we consume these things on social media we automatically feel like we’re failing at life; like we’re the only ones struggling. It's a mirage, because we are only seeing the perfect side of people’s lives, not the struggle that got them there. The majority of the time what we’re seeing isn't even real; it's fake lives, fake people, fake accomplishments. We’re not actually seeing their reality, which is most likely just as messy as ours. When we see the comparison between our lives and theirs it sets us up for failure; comparison is the killer of joy and trying to compare ourselves with a fake version of someone we see online can cause us to lose the drive within ourselves to reach our full potential.

We need to love ourselves from the inside out. We need to love the struggle as much as the success, because that means we care enough to try. We care enough to rise up and try to make our lives better. And it doesn’t matter if you’re single, married, or are starting over. Everyone has a different path to follow, and no specific path is the right or perfect one. One of the most important things to remember and the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to have a relationship with ourselves; to love ourselves, to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves grace while passing on that love and kindness to others. If you think about it, we’re all novices at life. We’re all just trying to figure out what it means to be human and how to live in our bodies for the first time. Let go and be kind to yourself today. Celebrate your strength, your accomplishments and the struggles you’ve survived ❤️‍🩹