Thursday 18 March 2010

Enough

Looking at Tracey Clark's wonderful 'i am enough' Collective page this morning - take a look at the idea, I think it's marvellous..

I was talking to this chap the other day about Choice and wellbeing, and an interesting conversation ensued.  The upshot of which was something of a lightbulb moment:  If I can make a conscious choice about my emotions, about how I choose to react to a given situation where before I always felt that my emotions were being done to me by other people, why can't I choose other things as well?

Can I choose to love myself?

Self-hate has always been a huge issue for me.  Hence the self-harming behaviours in my teens and twenties that saw me weighing 7 stone and in emotionally harmful relationships.  Self-harming habits are hard to shift.  Even now, when my life feels out of my control, I will go off and do something self-harming like eating a quarter-pounder with cheese meal (tummy poison for me) and feel soooo much better, even though I know I will suffer for it later.  It may not sound much, but its really no different from the relief I used to get from stabbing myself with a compass point as a teenager.

I've always approached self love and self confidence as something that I had to work hard to develop.  Something that comes from other people's approval, or from what you achieve.  But what if it's not?  What if I could make the choice to say, 'I love myself just as I am.'  Just as I make the choice to say 'I'm not going to let so-and-so upset me today'.  What would happen then?

Make the choice.   Then act as if.

No comments:

Post a Comment