Appreciating Yourself Where You're At

Hi everyone!

This week I wanted to talk about appreciating yourself and being proud of yourself in even the “smallest” of moments. One of my closest friends and I had a long heart-to-heart the other day about our futures, goals, and aspirations. Both of us have a lot of goals and try really hard to be the best that we can be, but this comes with a lot of pressure. This pressure is rarely from others, and it is mostly from us expecting ourselves to be perfect.

Over the last few years, I have realized that you can only plan your future so much. The world will always throw the unexpected at you and it shows who you are as a person by how you handle those situations. Like I said in my last post, there are bound to be tough moments. I find that society expects you to work through these grievances easily and seamlessly. I feel that this causes people to feel incredibly invalidated when it comes to handling situations well since that is what is expected. Because of the expectation to act perfectly in all situations, it feels silly to be proud of yourself for doing just about anything. I feel that this really affects people's confidence and ability to take pride in who they are. When I struggled with depression, it was incredibly hard to get out of bed and to take care of myself, and even once I started doing those things, I still didn’t feel proud of myself because I had spent so much time struggling to do those things. When coming back from tough times like that it feels like everything you do to better yourself is making up for that time instead of just moving forward and being proud of yourself for taking the time and energy to put your best foot forward every day. Sometimes the hardest thing to do in life isn’t being there for others, working towards your goals, or completing that annoying task at hand. It’s caring for yourself despite what phase of life you’re in. It’s very hard to be the best version of yourself when you’re not caring for yourself in ways that fill your own cup.

It is one thing to be proud of what you've done and another to be proud of who you are. I personally believe it is much more important to be proud of who you are because that flows into what you do for yourself and others. Everyone always talks about self-love, but not self-appreciation. It’s important to appreciate yourself and everything you do for yourself. It’s easy to feel like getting out of bed, cooking yourself dinner, etc. are silly things to be proud of yourself for, but sometimes those are the most difficult things to do and the best places to start when rebuilding yourself.