What Does Self-Love Mean To You?

Chances are you can open also any magazine nowadays and self-love is likely to come up. If you google ‘what does self love mean?’ Google returns you so many answers, whether it’s the technical definition or the various perspectives that people have on it.

We have become so concerned with defining what self-love is and gaining advice on how to achieve it that we have forgotten that the journey to self-love is an independent and largely subjective one. 

It’s funny because the phrase ‘self-love’ is pretty self-explanatory, it literally means loving yourself. Yet it remains one of the most frequently asked questions in most magazines that we pick up, with us always trying to feed the desire to find the answer of what it should mean from someone else, with me ironically about to be one of those people. 

So, what does self-love mean to me, how do I define it and how do I think it should be reflected in our everyday lives. 

Well, I think that in life you really have to be your own biggest cheerleader, you have to be the one to really believe in yourself, know your worth and your capabilities. Of course, having supportive friends and family does help but as I have experienced with female (and male) friends of mine, other people’s words of encouragement don’t mean much if you don’t believe in yourself as a starting point. Having said that, this feeling of self-worth and self-love doesn’t happen overnight. Over time you learn to accept who you are and know who you want to become, eventually you begin to fall in love with yourself a little bit more each day. It’s a slow, gradual process but once you’re able to look in the mirror, no longer think about negatively about the person staring back at you, it’s one of the best feelings in the world. It will reach a point when self-love is so engrained within you that it is no longer something that you consciously think about you just go about your day being the girl (or guy!) boss that you are.

Whilst my answer is something that I truly believe and is a relationship with myself that I am lucky enough to have, 

I think that when it comes to self-love, hearing my definition or that of someone who really inspires you or that you share a bond with may provide you with some level of comfort at the time, in the long-run it will not be that useful to you if you do not start to embark on your own self-love journey. 

If other people provided the answers for us, we wouldn’t constantly see questions about self-love in self-help books or as inspirational quotes filling your time lines on Instagram or Twitter.  

So now, I pose the question to you. Have you reached a point that you feel as though you love yourself and if so what was your journey to get there? Even if you don’t feel as though you have please share your thoughts and let’s have an open a discussion about it. 

The beautiful thing about this is that there is no right answer, every journey is different and provides something from which we can learn from.