morning & welcome back to the afterglow newsletter ☕️
just as a reminder, i’m hannah & each week i’m sending you some recipe inspiration for the upcoming week and sharing my favourite tips about productivity, lifestyle & organization.
✨ if you want to let me know what i should cover next, let me know here.
☕️ breakfast
🥗 lunches
🍲 dinners
🫐 snacks
✨ what is self-love? ✨
good morning & happy friday. sorry for the delay on my newsletter this week but we move. i know i am a bit off schedule from what i said i would be writing about last week, but a few readers came to me to ask for some input around an important topic - self-love. feel free to continue reading or listen to my first recording of the afterglow newsletter if you prefer, it’s pretty rough but i’ll get more natural eventually :)
this isn’t something that i’m going to be able to completely cover in one newsletter, much like self-love, breaking down the topic requires time and patience. my goal is to start talking about it today and then incorporate elements of it into the next few weeks based on some topics i’m looking forward to writing about.
so, anyways, what is self-love? i scoured the internet and here are a few definitions i’ve found:
“regard for one's own well-being and happiness” - oxford dictionary
“self-love is a state of appreciation for oneself that grows from actions that support our physical, psychological and spiritual growth. self-love means having a high regard for your own well-being and happiness” - brain and behaviour foundation
“self-love, is inextricably linked to self-esteem, it being: our ability to see ourselves as a flawed, imperfect individuals and still hold ourselves in high regard” - the self space
i think that there are elements of these that are all correct but i also think there’s power in not trying to set a hard definition on self-love. today i want to work on separating the concept that there’s even a standard, or a definition, of self-love that you need to work up to.
maybe this is a hot take, but in my personal development experience, i have found it difficult to maintain loving myself as a constant. maybe that is what we should aspire to, but i aspire to many things. i aspire to have amazing days, every day. i aspire to make the right choice, with every decision. i aspire for a lot of things, sometimes they happen but sometimes they also don’t. that’s human, that’s life.
the reason i bring this up is because when people came to me asking about self-love the first thing i thought was “do i even love myself?” how can i give advice on something i’m not even sure about. sometimes i love myself but sometimes i also don’t.
another thing that came to mind is, “how am i so in love with my partner if i don’t even know if i’m in love with myself?”. growing up i’ve *literally* always heard people say you shouldn’t be in a relationship if you don’t love yourself but i think it has to do more with not being in a relationship if you don’t know yourself.
the self space put it really nicely by saying:
“how can you expect others to love you if you don’t love yourself?” these sentiments and other principles of the self-love movement have caused so many of us to hold on tightly to the idea that we need to fully love ourselves in order to be loveable. that we need to have fully worked on ourselves, be all tidied up, put-together and completely emotionally, physically, socially and spiritually healthy before entering into a relationship or before we can be really loveable.
but today isn’t about relationships & loving yourself, it’s about setting a foundation. i also just want to note before we get any deeper, i’m not very knowledgeable in this area, i’m just speaking from my experiences that i’ve build up in my short 24 year old life so far. i feel like i’ve made many decisions in the past six years that have allowed me to live out many different lives and versions of myself.
to avoid any further digression on my part i want to talk about what i said earlier about knowing yourself. for me, part of not defining self-love and setting a standard that you somehow have to reach comes from breaking it into little bits and pieces. in my opinion some of this manifests in the form of:
1. knowing yourself
2. honesty
3. acceptance
you’re going to get to a point where you just know what your weaknesses are. you are probably more aware of what gives you the ick about yourself than you know what is amazing about you. part of that comes from this standard of living where social media dictates how we feel we should live or who we feel we should be. stop trying to be that person and focus on how you are brilliant in your own right. what if you put the same amount of energy into making what is awesome about yourself even stronger rather than trying to change every little thing.
knowing yourself means understanding what makes you feel good, what makes you feel bad. it’s knowing where you thrive and what environments make it difficult for you to be your best.
being honest with yourself in all this is to look at where you are, and how you continue to put yourself in the places where you don’t thrive in order to achieve a version of yourself that isn’t true to you. as soon as you can start being true to yourself, the sooner you can move away from anxiety because something just doesn’t feel right and you can stop apologizing for who you are.
this is a silly anecdote but this is an example of me being true to me. when i book an airbnb, i have to be transparent about adding extra guests to the booking even if it means paying more. i have to return that item to the exact place i got it in the grocery store when i decide i don’t want it anymore. being true to myself is saying no when my best friend asks me to pretend i’m his landlord for a housing application. even if these actions inconvenience other people’s plans, that’s just who i am and if you want to spend time with me or do things with me, small things like this may pop up and you just have to be okay with that.
this is where acceptance comes in of course, trying to accept the small things. the wins and the losses. moving toward an accepting version of yourself will help relieve a lot of anxiety, you deserve better than to hide behind a mask.
i’m not going to go into how you can start lovin’ yourself today, i’d rather you just sit with what i’ve spoken about so far and hold onto it for a lil bit, think about it. and think about moving away from this definition that self-love is something that needs to be met on a daily basis. it’s really something that we are all navigating and working towards.
if you want to keep in touch with me you can find me on youtube, pinterest & spotify.
i would like to acknowledge that the afterglow newsletter is written & produced on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the Coast Salish peoples–Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations.
missed some of the last few newsletters and need more recipe/productivity ideas? check out the latest three newsletters below 👇
how to roughly organize your life → routines, budgets, careers, space, priorities
productivity → how to reframe a ‘bad’ day, planning vs action, how to focus, how to set yourself up for success the night before, from sunshine to fall
routines → anatomy of a routine, am i sick or am i just tired?, adjusting to the seasons, my 3 tips for meal prep, an instagram-less life
balance & motivation → how to embrace good times, maintaining relationships while working on yourself, navigating imposter syndrome, finding motivation in times of uncertainty, 6 tips to find motivation, how to find balance in life, facing change
mindfulness → the power of now, let’s talk about positive mindsets, hey, where’s your mind at?, ways to make the most out of summer, when it's never enough, slow living, a newfound social anxiety
fitness → recharging from your workouts, i’m officially done 75 hard, halfway through 75 hard
recipes & food → afterglow eats, my favourite taco salad bowl, avo sunny-side up eggs on greens
This post really touch something inside me. Thanks a lot for writing this.