I Love Myself ~ Defining My Own Labels

The 'I Love Myself' series are a guide to loving myself. I'll be writing about the steps I took to fall in love with myself and how it has shaped me into the awesomeness I am today! Just a word of warning: There will be lots of self-love, self-praise, and mention of awesomeness. Haters are not welcome, thank you very much!

Fat, selfish, loser, dumb, emotional fool, ugly, imperfect, arrogant, rude, evil, liar, thief. Those are just some of the labels I have heard and seen people define me with over the course of my lifetime.

Fat because I was, well, fat.
Selfish for needing some time to attend to own survival needs.
Loser for not wasting my teenage obsessing over guys.
Dumb as in only knowing what was taught to me in books.
Emotional fool for being cheated on by friends and even relatives.
Ugly and imperfect according to the eyes of the beholder.
Arrogant for thinking I was a good girl.
Rude for being slightly on the quiet side with new people.
Evil for supposedly plotting and ruining someone's day.
Liar for saying out loud truths that had to be heard.
Thief for covering someone else's own lame intentions.

I've heard it all and much more too. But guess what? I did not let anybody define me and that has been one of the mightiest steps in my journey of falling in love with myself.

When people meet you they pick certain labels - certain words and terms - to try and describe you. If someone likes you these labels are influenced by their liking, admiration, and even their bias in your favor. But when the haters enter the stage their labels are influenced by their petty minds and abhorrence towards you. Sometimes, they base these definitions on their personal judgments and other times they derive these from pure evil intentions to malign your name or to discount your existence. I define people in my head too. It's the way we perceive the world, to be honest. But I don't force my labels onto people. Unfortunately however, a vast majority of the world does force their labels and it is wrong. I've realized that I cannot control the labels and definitions people choose for me, both the good ones and the bad ones. However, I do have full control over choosing to accept or deny them. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the actual defining moment where I get to pick what I want to perceive myself as.

When I was going through particularly challenging times (bullies and haters all around me, ugh) I was left alone in my own company. As I've mentioned before, this alone time was crucial in my journey towards self love. I thought and I pondered and I complained and I questioned. I also answered and realized and learnt a lot. It was during that time that I truly met myself; for the first time ever I was saying 'hello' to who I really was, actually sitting down with that person, and having a heart to heart with her. I met myself and I heard myself and I saw myself and I realized which one of those many many labels were correct and which ones were false. I thought about each one of them and with brutal honesty I judged my own character to come to a completely unbiased conclusion of what I really was. When the kerfuffle settled, I emerged victorious; I knew who I was and how and why. I knew my good, my bad, my ugly. I knew which terms and labels could define me and which ones couldn't. And then I decided I no longer needed anybody else's labels. My strength came from defining my own labels and they and the strong will of rejecting what others chose to term me as ultimately lead to this love affair with myself.

Learning to identify the world's labels and conclude their authenticity is necessary for staying sane, my friends. When you can decipher the right from the wrong labels you can also decipher who are the people who are honest with you and who are the ones trying to bring you down. That is exactly what I have done. I have achieved a good understanding of who the toxic people in my life are and ever since I came to know the haters I've trained myself to reject their labels and toxicity.

I believe that the key to my happiness and self love is my ability to define my self with my own labels. Every single day I come across various kinds of people - humans, monsters, and ghouls. These people judge me using their biased judgement and I simply cannot leave my definition up to their discretion. It is of immense importance that I take matters into my own hands, that I take my self into my own hands. The only person on this planet who knows me for what I really am is me. So I should be the only one who gets to define and describe me and make conclusions about my existence.

In all honesty, every single human being knows their good and bad deep down in their hearts. The road to self love includes checkpoints where you must become well acquainted with yourself so that when you meet people's labels you can recognize them as road blocks, change your path and take another well known, reasonable, pleasant route towards a self that you can accept ... towards a self that you can live with ... towards a self that you can fall in love with. As for me, I choose to create my own route - a custom one where the only road blocks I accept to meet are my internal struggles which I can beat and emerge a better, more beautiful, more awesome human being.

I will no longer let someone tell me that my skincare routine before bedtime is my selfish and self centered behavior. I will no longer let someone tell me that I could only get good grades on what I memorized through textbooks and am otherwise a dumb ass. I know that is not true and I will not question my sensibility or maturity anymore. I will no longer let someone judge my facial features or the way God has expressed me and then tell me I am or am not up to some 'standards' of beauty. No. I choose not to let anybody define me. Because they don't have the right to.

To me, I am enough. My opinion is enough. My judgment is enough.

I don't want nor do I need the world's labels, thank you very much.