The last four and a half years of my life have forced me to spend too much unplanned time on my own I'd frankly say. The unannounced arrival of our second son at 25 weeks totally flipped the script of life as we knew it and it has never been the same since. Faced with the reality and big decision to either leave full time work to give him the support I knew he needed or going back to full time work, I chose the former because how many know, sometimes if you listen close enough your gut will lead and let you know what you ought to do.
The thing that I wasn't prepared for was the sheer amount of alone time one experiences when you are at home with the kids. Days that had been filled with apparent ‘busyness’ were forced to slow down to truly show what was in them. I don’t know about you, but when I’m mostly alone I mostly get to think, I think a whole lot! Whilst I found myself delving in business from home, I also found myself on an unplanned journey of self-discovery.
You see, when you have alone time you really know what’s true and what's not in your life and that's true of relationships and yourself. I noticed that I spent a lot of time tending to the needs of others and less so to mine. Then once I noticed this, I found myself frustrated at what I felt was an imbalance of having to tend to others so often. The voids of life slipping in.
What I have since learnt is that, voids in life are really self love voids and no one and nothing can ever fill what we ourselves don't have. Nobody can ever fill you, they only compliment what's there - the inadequacies we experience or feel for the most part are an inability to fully love ourselves.
There will always be an expectation from someone or something else but it's all about how we 'really' feel about ourselves and only we can fix that. And we fix that by learning to love and embrace who we truly are. It's a case of stopping to put unrealistic expectations on others and learning to love ourselves. That one thing, is the greatest thing I have learnt and is the most invaluable of life lessons of my last four and a half years. Fulfilment in life comes from the inside out because how we see and perceive the world is predominantly birthed on the inside.
We give to others and to life what we have inside. It's not selfish to practice and cultivate self-love, it's important and it's healthy. Now I know that self-love is irrespective of gender, however, as a woman sometimes it feels like we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders. Now that I am a mum to a daughter I have reframed some of my perspectives and so the lens that I see life through has changed. I want my daughter to know that she too as a woman is very important. She matters, her life matters and what greater way to teach this than by modelling self love to her by living it myself. Life lessons that stick are not those aggrandised by beautiful oration but those lived out day to day.
When we love ourselves, we know our worth and our value. The way we experience life changes the relationships we have or don't have, how people treat us or don't treat us, the chances we are willing to take or not take. This inner belief that we can do and be more, it all stems and is influenced not by how others but by how we see ourselves. Self-love is therefore what I know to be true to being fulfilled in life.