by Ushna Iftikhar
In this world full of chaos, people often forget about themselves. We all love someone or something but when do we fall in love with ourselves? People usually get curious about what the heck self-love is, so do you or I am actually. For me, self-love is the most worthy thing in our lives. The feeling of being beautiful, just the way you are. When you will stop sacrificing your pleasures and happiness for others it will keep your mental health on point.
Self-love offers you to spend some quality time with you to reflect your needs and problems. Now for a moment forget about the problems of your surroundings and just think about yourself. What comes in your mind first? Who are you? And what your surroundings made you? Just think and think……… In this quarantine period, we all have a lot of time to spend with ourselves. Before writing this I contacted some of my friends and asked them how their life was going on and how they were spending their quarantine period. Some of them said ‘’yar Ghar ka Kam Phir online classes’’ (just household chores and online classes) and some said ‘life is so boring these days’.
Actually life is not humdrum but your activities made this period boring. In this period, I also tried to think about myself but I drooped. I was the reason behind this failure. Because we only think about ourselves for a moment whenever we get emotional or watch some motivational videos. The next moment we forget. We are not stuck because our ambient made us change.
I started watching some skincare videos on YouTube. I hardly follow this for one day only. I am so much indulged in my environment that I don’t want to take myself seriously. It’s all about your mind-set. Without a clear mindset, it’s easy to talk about yourself out of the things and get frustrated when you can’t focus. That’s why I made a goal, to start and finish a day with mental clarity. Through this, I can focus on myself. I feel more positive and productive. It helps me to appreciate, respect, and accept myself. And this makes me go for better choices in life.
I took small shifts in my daily activities to positively support the energetic directions of my life and things started to shift. If you can’t love yourself you can’t love anyone else either but there is a huge difference between being self-lover and self-centered; selfish. Being selfish will always keep you restless. So one should be a self-lover but not selfish. Being supportive and using positive words towards ourselves and towards others as well decreases negativity in our lives and a positive side of our personality gradually emerges. Being self-lover is a part of maturing without being anxious and depressed because to be a self-lover needs to experience both harsh and happy realities of life.
Ushna Iftikhar, a student of the Punjab University in Lahore, is a blogger.
Well written. Keep it up.