While I was browsing Pinterest, I came across the #LoveMe Challenge. According to the page I found, #LoveMe is a challenge to love yourself. Everyday there will be a prompt for you to look at yourself, embrace who you are, and hopefully help you learn that you are beautiful, you are amazing and you need to love who you are.
Seeing as how I’ve been facing some interesting challenges of my own lately, I thought this might be a good way to remind myself that despite my health and marital issues, I’m still a pretty awesome human being.
The first prompt is “Why are you doing #loveme?” I think the obvious it that for a long time, I didn’t feel like I was “good enough” – for my husband, for my friends, for myself… I had somehow lost the spark that made me me. Moving to Austin was a huge step in the right direction for me. I was happier than I had been in a long time. And in some ways, I think that might have been threatening to my husband. I was learning to be happy again without needing him to be the catalyst. When he pulled away from our marriage, from me, I felt very unloved. And all my happiness vanished. And then the cancer diagnosis happened.
I realized that my visit to the dermatologist wasn’t because I had seen something on my skin that shouldn’t have been there; it was driven by vanity. It wasn’t driven by the self-love of “I need to take care of myself”; it was driven by the need to put on appearances for others. And that was the wrong motivation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad I went and I’m glad the melanoma was caught early. But I keep wondering if I had loved myself a little more, maybe I would have gone to the dermatologist in the summer…
What would convince you to love yourself? What would be your motivation? Melanoma is kind of a big wake-up call. I sure wish I would have thought about loving myself before I had this…