The beast within me restored my inner peace

Chapter Thirteen: Putting Yourself First

You might feel guilty when putting yourself first but it isn't something to feel bad about. Putting yourself first is important for finding your inner peace. However, when you date someone for too long, you start to neglect yourself because you are focusing too much on the other person. Making sure that they are happy, safe, loved, healthy, protected, and taken care of. So when do you make sure that all of those things are applicable to you too? You shouldn't have to depend on someone else to put you first. The reality is that nobody might ever do that, you have to do it yourself. People call it selfish to put yourself first but I call it a necessity. Making you the priority is what you need to focus on especially when you haven't been made the priority before. Taking steps back when it comes to your own personal growth to see everything from a bigger perspective. Finding yourself and your inner peace will give you a better chance at having a happier future. I tried this thing on having a routine but I said in previous chapters that making a routine for yourself can be quite boring, stressful and frustrating. There is no fixed method for happiness and we have to do what we can to make us happy by ourselves. That way we will know what makes us happy and be prepared for future relationships. When you don't love yourself and know yourself, how do you expect anyone else to get to know who you truly are on the inside? Getting to fall in love with everything that makes you you is the most beautiful and fascinating part of self-discovery. Taking all of the pressure off of yourself and focusing on growth. Loving yourself makes you feel more confident and assured that you can accomplish anything you put your mind to. It took me 2 weeks to get the foundation going from the ground up to finding who I am. Those 2 weeks were spent in the most exhausting, straining, emotionally and psychologically hectic ways possible. Taking every second possible to let everything out. Searching deep for the root feeling of what was hurting the most. Finding out exactly what was making me feel incomplete and not good enough. When I took the time to isolate myself from the world and focus primarily on what issues were holding me back from fully being myself... It shocked me to the core with everything that I learned. The anxiety attacks, stomach spasms, body aches, migraines, crying episodes, black out days, and breakdowns led me to meditation, spiritual motivation, self-therapy, inner strength, self-love and letting the beast within me restore my inner peace. We have to go through a difficult time to appreciate a good time. That is what you learn along your journey of healing. The difficult parts that are the worst to experience make us truly grateful for when the good parts in life come into focus. It's not a crime to lose yourself when you're in the process of finding yourself. Think of it as a way of building something out of play dough. When you make a mistake and don't see the imagine you are trying to create, you break it all up to rebuild it again. That's the way I looked at it from a psychological perspective. When we feel lost inside, as if the pieces of the puzzle down fit together, we simply take them all apart and try again from the beginning... We are all unique and there is no fixed pattern to follow when building ourselves up. Yet we can all say that rebuilding ourselves takes time, persistence, patience and forgiveness. We need to forgive ourselves for not being able to take care of ourselves sooner. Looking in the mirror and saying that you are happy to see yourself instead of saying things like you're ugly or that you aren't happy with who you are anymore. Getting used to loving what you see in the mirror is important too. At the end of the day, you will always be you. Whether you hate the colour of your eyes or wish that your teeth were a different shape or that you hate the shape of your body, etc. You were created as you are and you are beautiful or handsome. Don't let society's standards tell you that you are not allowed to put yourself first because of a certain body type you should have or a certain hairstyle that would make you fit in, etc. If you feel like being creative in dyeing your hair, getting a tan, or trying new outfits then that's perfectly alright. If it turns into you trying to completely change everything about you in order to satisfy society's idea of what is attractive and trending right now, that's not okay. Learning to love yourself is difficult because of what society tells us we should be but that shouldn't scare you off from trying anyway. When you take those steps and eventually get to the point you were aiming for, you will be so relieved that you started in the first place. It takes a lot of patience with yourself to get to where you want to be in life. That's why a lot of people quit before they get started. The thought of having to be patient with themselves is almost impossible when waiting for an Instagram photo to load for two minutes drives the average person nuts. However, you need to put yourself first before ever thinking of being with anyone in the future. A relationship should be about two people building happiness together, not weighing each other down. If you both don't know who you really are on the inside, you will be influenced by people to being someone that you aren't and that will lead to being toxic towards one another when that wasn't the intention when you first started dating. Make yourself a priority in order to know how to treat that special someone one day too. If you can't respect yourself, you can't respect somebody else.