Self-Love

           My best friend just sent me a message with a picture containing this quote: “Someone once told me that I’d never be able to love unless I learned to love myself, but I loved him so much that I forgot what hating myself felt like.”

As this is a quote that’s meant to get you thinking, as soon as I read it a million thoughts raced through my head. The most prominent one being, I don’t want someone that I love so much to believe that the first part of this quote is true. “Someone once told me that I’d never be able to love unless I learned to love myself.” Never would I want the most important person in my life to think that this is how love works, hell I wouldn’t want anyone to think that this is how love works. Admittedly, I am not exactly an expert in the love department, however I have very, very strong opinions on it.

The person who sent me the quote is perhaps the most influential person I’ve had the honor of knowing. Despite her incredible feats, just like we all do, she struggles with self-love. As a person looking in from the outside, I do have trouble understanding what she has not to love, but I’m not in her head and I think she feels the same way about me. Take that into consideration if you choose, but she is the most loving human being I know as well and I really think it would be a loss for the world not to feel her love because she thinks it’s invalid.

Anyone can love. No matter who you are, how old you are, where you come from, what has happened to you, what struggles you have, none of this can discredit anyone’s ability to love.  If you were to ask a group of sixteen-year-old girls if any of them loved themselves 100%, not one of those girls would answer yes. So is it fair to say that an entire population of people is incapable of loving others? It is not fair, because it simply isn’t true.

Learning to love yourself is the hardest kind of love to learn in my opinion. Deep, true, whole self-love is a very rare trait to come across in a person. We learn to love by loving others. Sometimes it takes someone else to teach us how to love. Because when you love someone so wholeheartedly, it can teach you how to love yourself as well. Sometimes it takes a broken heart to learn how to love yourself. After deeply loving someone else, when they are no longer there to love, we can redirect that love onto ourselves.

Basically, you don’t have to love yourself to love someone else. It’s a complicated and confusing, and painful, and enchanting thing, love. And its different for every person. But do it. Don’t be afraid to love someone with everything you have. Don’t be afraid to tell them everyday that you love them. Don’t be afraid to show them that you love them. Because doing all of these can teach you very important things and they will move you towards being a more whole human being. And that’s the goal, right?

Love and hugs

xx

Body Confidence!

Think about this for a minute: you stand at your mirror every morning, assessing what you’ve chosen to wear and what your hair looks like. You pick out and try your best to fix the flaws. You might see these flaws every single day, or there might some new ones. As hard as you try to fix some of them, you aren’t satisfied.

            Weather you love your body or not so much, every one of us humans do this. It’s a daily habit we learn to adopt because of all of the pressure that is put on us through society and the media (that’s a whole other topic though). If there is someone out there who looks in the mirror each day and is 100% happy with their appearance, please tell me your secret! But until then, I have compiled a few things we can do to feel a little bit more fierce.

            The first thing is shopping. When you go shopping, make sure you try everything on. Everything. And if you’re not really in the mood to try on twenty-three tops and seven pairs of jeans, come back another day and try again. It is never a good idea to buy something without seeing if you love it on your body. Chances are, if you get it home and it doesn’t look the best on you, you’ll either be completely unmotivated to return it, or you wear it anyway and feel no-so-great.  When you’re in the dressing room in the store though, always keep in mind that no one looks terrific in those small cubicles. The lighting is terribly unflattering and there isn’t any room to spin and twirl and strut in your new look, so take that into consideration. If you put something on and you have to convince yourself that it’s “fine”, it isn’t for you. When you put on new clothing, it should make you feel fresh and new and wonderful. If it doesn’t, hang it back up and keep searching!

            Another important component to body confidence is cherishing your home. Not your home as in your house; your body is the home that houses your colorful spirit and it needs to be cherished. We all have parts of ourselves that we think need to be changed, but they don’t. We are all perfect human beings, we just don’t see it. Have you ever written a word too many times so it starts to look wrong? The same thing happens to our bodies. Since we see the same thing all the time, we forget that we are one of a kind and insanely special. So that part of you that you hate? Someone else thinks it’s stunning. Always remember that and you will start to love it as well.

            Lastly and perhaps the most important, accentuate the parts of you that you love! Don’t be afraid to wear what makes you love yourself. If you love your legs, wear the shorter dress and show them off. If you love your boobs, wear that tight shirt and a push up bra; if you got it flaunt it! If you love your eyes, wear your favorite makeup look that makes them stand out everyday. There is never anything wrong with loving yourself!

Love and hugs

xx

            

How To Master Your Perfect Morning

Weather you’re still in school, working, or a stay-at-home parent, everyone has those awful and dreary mornings when all you want is to go back to bed. A morning can make or break a day; it can set you up for a day filled with smiles or it can lead you to a day of gloomy “failures” (because lets face it, a bad day is not a failure). Picture yourself in that position: it’s a cold winters morning. The sky is cloudy and the air brisk. Your bed is the warmest and most cozy place that you could ever be on a day like this, but you’ve already hit snooze six times and at this point you only have twenty-seven minutes and thirty-one seconds until you have to leave your house. We’ve all been there and we will all be there again. So I’ve put together a small list of things you can do to un-mess that morning and make a great day for yourself.

1. Try on some outfits the night before and choose the one you feel best in. Not having the added pressure of what to wear can instantly shed time off of your getting ready
2. Make and pack a yummy lunch/snack and stick it in the refrigerator so that all you have to do is grab it on your way out the next morning. (P.S. it’s also a great idea to put a water bottle in there too so you have a cold drink for your morning commute).
3.  Although this is the opposite of what most of us want to do, set your alarm for about ten or fifteen minutes early. This way you most definitely wont be rushing and frazzled while you’re trying to make that eyeliner perfectly winged.
4.  Don’t leave any work to do in the morning. We’ve all done it. You think you’re so ungodly tired at 1:38 am that you couldn’t possibly write one more sentence of your essay. Leave it till morning. You think to yourself. That’s a way better idea. Wrong. It is never a better idea.
5. Lay out all of your beauty products on your dresser before you go to sleep so that you wont have to waste any precious time searching your drawers for your favorite contouring brush that you swore you left next to the moisturiser.
6.  Shower the night before. I find it’s always easier and faster to style dry hair than wet in the morning so you’ll feel even more fabulous with your glamorous hair. Also, you wont have to be tortured by the temptation of staying under the warm water for fifteen minutes when you should be dressed already.
7.  Make a rise and shine playlist on Spotify to jam out to while you get ready. Your favorite song will help anything.

That concludes the list, although there are endless amounts of things you can do to make those tough mornings a bit easier. I hope some of these help you as much as they help me as well. But always remember, this is a process so never pressure yourself to change all of your not-so-helpful habits all in one night. Start with one habit and change it to one of these. Once you master that one, add another.  Eventually every morning will be more delightful than the last.

Love and hugs

xx