Could you tell me a time you truly loved who you are?

I never thought I would be sitting here writing a note on a time I felt I loved who I was- I always thought that people who said they had reached “ self love” were lying and I thought I’d get to a point where I too lied that I liked myself. 

I have spent the last 19 years hating every fibre of my being but in 2019 I started reclaiming bits of myself in the war I was raging internally. One day when I was sitting on my councillors comfortable blue couch we un loaded the compounding social pressure I felt to be ‘ what everyone wanted me to be’. I realised in that moment I’d been living a lie - an inauthentic version of myself where I had based all my self worth and self esteem on how much people liked and accepted me. I realised that existing in this place was fuelling my anxiety and depression and I was dissolving the true fibre of who I actually was. 

I can’t tell you when I started accepting and reclaiming bits of my self back.  

It was like a small thing at a time, I stopped wearing clothes to ‘ be cool’ and wore what I liked and made me feel good. I stopped stressing over what someone thought about me when I was introduced to them. I stopped hiding my anxiety or my sadness or my happiness. I started treating myself like a friend, I rested when I was overwhelmed, I prioritised my needs first over others and I listened to the voice deep inside that I’d been ignoring for years. 

In October 2019 I stepped into a little hat stall in Camden markets in London 

I picked up a little fedora type hat with a feather in it. I put it on and stared in the mirror. For the first time in my life my brain didn’t scream “ YUCK” at me, in fact I said to myself wow, this hat is a bit of YOU. I immediately bought the hat and wore it out of the shop and I didn’t really take it off for the rest of my trip. I almost felt like when I wore my hat, with my favourite black jeans, my band t shirt with my sleeve tattoo delicately inked down to my wrist that I finally was living an authentic version of who I was. I no longer felt the outside was just a reflection of what I thought people wanted to see. I was just being me. 

In that moment in the hat store I felt a glow, and I couldn’t stop smiling. In that one single moment I’d accepted everything that I wasn’t and everything I was. I truly loved my whole being. I can’t tell you I feel like this all the time, it comes and goes but I can tell you the war which was raging, there was white flags when I realised we were both on the same side.