The deepest form of self-care is building a life you are in love with

Linda Apollo

The deepest form of self-care is building a life you are in love with and that is often a very unbeautiful thing. It is making a spreadsheet of your debt and enforcing a morning routine and cooking yourself healthy meals and no longer just running from your problems and calling the distraction a solution. It means looking your failures and disappointments square in the eyes and restrategizing. It is not satiating your immediate desires. It is letting go. It is choosing new. It is disappointing some people. It is making sacrifices for others.  It is living a way that other people will not. So, maybe you can live in a way that other people cannot. It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt bath and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life. Not escape from it.

It is okay if you are slowly becoming the person you want to be. Real growth takes time. The things that stick and the things that stay are often the things we put together gradually, with heart and soul effort. What arrives too fast often leaves that quickly too. What arrives slowly is often what we savor most, because it is what we placed all of our love into. It is what we made space in our lives to hold. Please, do not think you are falling behind just because your growth is not happening as fast as you thought it might. Seasons do not turn overnight but always arrive just in time.

Learn to let go of other people’s opinions of your life. I hope you start to see there is no universally correct way to live a life that is solely your own. Every person has different goals, has different concepts of what happiness looks like. We all have different perspectives of what it truly means to be alive. People will judge you, the world will try to change you but you have to stand firm and continue to move in your own direction, you have to continue to go at your own pace. Do not allow anything to alter your path, you are going to end up living someone else’s life. Learn how to make your life your own. Learn how to make your time here something you are proud of.

Learn to let go of your tendency to favor distance over depth. Learn how to open to the world, how to let love pour into your life. We often protect ourselves from seeming too eager or too invested. We hold back our feelings because we do not want to seem more overly emotional or tender. We silence our instincts, we corrupt our souls and at the end of it all, we feel alone. I hope you learn how to let go of your fears, learn how to remind yourself that there is nothing wrong with vulnerability, with being human.  It is okay to share your heart with another human being, with this world. There is beauty to be found in being the person who cares. Go ahead and care.

Learn how to let go of the comparison you hold so close to your chest. Learn to strive to dismantle the distractions. I hope you strive to see beyond what is manicured and what is filtered in this life. You are a special human who is living and breathing in this universe, who is healing through and moving through seasons of beauty and seasons of change and seasons of evolution each and every day. Your experience in this world will never be perfect, will never be faultless but it will be real. It will be honest. I hope you learn how to embrace that.

It is okay to let go of stories you tell yourself, of the ways in which you have let all that has hurt you, all that has bruised your soul, convince you that you needed to settle for less than what your heart desired. Learn how to let go of the parts of yourself that make you feel like you are not worthy of the kind of love that teaches you and hopes for you. Above all else, learn how to let go of the idea that you cannot be this person for yourself. You are your own safe place. Make your alone a beautiful place to be.

Most importantly, learn to let go of the idea that it is too late. It is never too late to change your life. It is never too late to become the person you have always hoped you could be or love the way you have always wanted to love. We usually forget that we are not bound by our past. We do not have to be who we were a year ago. We do not have to make the same mistakes we did when we were younger. We wake up every single day with the ability to start fresh, it is never too late to take advantage of that. It is never too late.