Life Lesson - Blog Posts

"i forgive myself for what i did" and "i should not have done that" are two statements that can and should coexist. you can forgive yourself while holding yourself accountable. you can understand that you fucked up while also understanding that you're human.

How do i love myself???

I've been meaning to write something like this for a while!

First off, what is self love?

I consider self love to be compassion towards yourself. Aware of your flaws, and aware of your good traits, but not hinging your sense of worth on either. I think of it as similar to characters people like - oftentimes our favorite characters are highly flawed people, and it's not that we love them despite those flaws, but we love the whole picture and want to see those characters grow.

How do you learn to love yourself?

I think it takes time! It's not something you can learn overnight, but something that comes with going through life.

And I think another important thing to remember is that baby steps are great, and it's absolutely okay if you don't love yourself right now. Your journey will take time. It might be a huge accomplishment for you to be self neutral - being okay with yourself and being neutral in your skin, even if you don't 'love' yourself. Here's a short blog post that talks about self neutrality!

Something simple you can do to change how you think of yourself is replace things like "ugh, I'm so stupid" with more neutral self talk, like "whoops, I made a mistake!" Your mind is listening to things you say to yourself, so work on replacing negativity with kindness.

Resources

Who Am I? Worksheet: Helps you enhance self awareness by looking at other people's perception of you, and your own perception of yourself (you can print and handwrite or just type your answers on a doc, whatever's easier for you)

'Love Letter' to Myself Worksheet: Helps self love by having you write down things you love about yourself, how they benefit you, and how you can continue to honor them

Loving Kindness Meditation: If meditation is your thing, loving kindness meditations are amazing! Essentially, they have you direct statements like "may I be happy, may I be well, may I be peaceful, may I be loved" at yourself, then a close friend, then an acquiantance, etc. I've linked my favorite one here, that I've done countless times. But if that particular recording isn't doing it for you you can search "loving kindness meditations" on youtube, spotify, etc and see what you like!

Ways to practice self love: An article that I really liked, because the author talked about how she'd pinned her sense of worth on her accomplishments and learning to let go of that.

You can also go through my self love tag! I use it for strategies, as well as things that you might have needed to hear.

“My arm!” he looks in shock

Nandu & Co go on a tour to Camp Cramp

Nandu, in his younger days, used to travel with his friends. On one of his winter trips, he visited Mysore. Mysore is a cool place and in the winter its even cooler (esp. to us southerners). This trip was an overnight trip, Nandu and his friends did some sight-seeing and came back to the lodge they were staying at for the night and started talking and playing cards after dinner.

Nandu had a habit of placing his arm over the chair when holding cards, as the night grew darker, the room became chilled (the room didn’t have any heating as for Mysoreans it was normal, they didn’t think it was cold enough for a heater). Nandu wrapped a shirt around him without removing his hand that was over the chair and continued playing. As it passed midnight, he started dozing off, his hand was still over the chair, sleepily he buttoned his shirt and dozed off right on the chair!

Around 3 at night he half wakes from his slumber, only to realise that one of his arm had gone missing! He tries to get up from his chair, but he can’t! He can’t feel his left arm at all, he tries to move his right hand over his left shoulder trying to see where the arm went and all he found was the empty sleeve of his shirt!

Terrified he starts yelling at his friends that his left arm has disappeared and slowly one by one they wake up. They too try to see what has happened and are shocked to see that his shirt sleeve is empty! They try to get him to move to the bed but even if 2 people tried to lift him, he’s kind of stuck to the chair! Nandu then panicked and began crying that someone stole his arm.

Scared and confused, some of his friends ran down to get the lodge manager for some advice. Then Nandu slowly got the feeling back in his left arm, he realised that as he wrapped and buttoned his shirt before dozing off, he forgot to put his left arm through the sleeve and in that cold night, his hand cramped and he couldn’t feel it!

Realising what had happened, his friends roared with laughter and the panicked manager was annoyed at being woken up at that time, but he couldn’t stay annoyed as he heard the story and went back laughing.

After the trip Nandu & co came back, but his friends never stopped teasing him about this incident for a long, long time.

The day I met my doppelganger.. of sorts

I love shopping and one day me and my husband, as usual, went together to the local mall and did a lot of grocery shopping. Luckily that day the queue at the checkout was quite small and as we stood in one line we both noticed that the cashier looked just like me!

A short but thinner version of me to be exact but our facial features were so similar! She looked at me almost the same time we looked at her and we could see her surprise.

Me and her, we both started giggling at the same time, controlling so other people won’t think that we’re making fun of them.

I was really surprised and my hubby nicknamed her as my twin and from that day onwards no matter how rush her counter was, I’d checkout there itself.

Oddest thing was we both smiled at each other happily, but neither of us knew the other’s name — probably because it felt like we knew each other with just uttering “Hi” and “Thankyou, bye”.

For some reason it felt more comfortable just smiling. Then she left the job and we moved to another city. But still remembering those moments make me smile.

This has made me curious to see what kind of people I’ll meet in the future, whether they be friendly or not. It’ll be interesting none the less.

you are the prize. and if no one has ever tell you that, you are the prize. your worth is not dependent on what other people say about you. your worth is what you are from the moment you were born. you were put this earth to be loved. you deserve the very best things in life. you deserve unconditional love. if there’s someone out there who isn’t treating you like the prize that you are, why are you with them? because they’ve done absolutely nothing to show you that they deserve you. if anything, they are telling you just how little worth they see in you right now, they are telling you that you have no good future with them, at least never a future where they are treating you well and giving you everything that you deserve. if you wouldn’t want to give someone else a future like that, why would you want that for yourself?

— if you see yourself as the prize that you are, would you really stay with someone who tells you you’re not?

don’t delude yourself, you know you wouldn’t hesitate to walk away.

marina grace

growing up, i taught myself that i didn’t need anyone, that i am perfectly fine without love or friends. i was wrong, because in the process of teaching myself it was okay to have no one, i pushed away those people who genuinely loves me, and growing up, i realised that while it is great to be perfectly fine without love or friends, it doesn’t mean that i can’t have one. it means that i can and that even without them, i am perfectly fine too.

— it’s okay to have no one and it’s also okay to have someone but it isn’t okay when you’re pushing everyone away to be stronger when sometimes, it isn’t them who makes you weak. it’s you.

marina grace