Christmas is the fest of love, family and compassion. Especially during Advent season, we are happy to pamper our loved ones and are trying to avoid conflicts. It is basically all about the picture perfect, we want to communicate – even though our reality often times looks pretty different.
First Things First
There is one question we should be asking ourselves during this reflective time of the year: what about ourselves? Should we not first and foremost care about us and love ourselves, before trying to give someone else our full attention? The saying goes, you have to love yourself first, in order to love someone else. Singer and actress Zendaya stresses the importance of self-love and how important it is to appreciate oneself. In an interview with the magazine New You she explains: “No matter what you´re dealing with, it´s so much harder and more draining and so much more exhausting to be constantly pretending to be something that you´re not“. She is telling us to just be ourselves, because it would simply be a waste of time to long after some ideal, that isn’t you.
Keep on Practicing
The singer Jorja Smith also wrote a column about this topic on redbull.com in the category “An Open Letter to my Younger Self”. She talks about self-love and how hard it is to accept yourself the way you are. She goes on about how much time we spend trying to compare ourselves to others. Accepting yourself is the first step to loving yourself. In her letter to her younger self she also confesses that she is still working on that to this day. Because let’s be honest, you live and you learn. Christmastime therefore is the perfect time for practicing. While we are rushing from holiday parties to buying the perfect gifts, its all the more important to give our body and mind its well deserved break. That could mean, spending more time on your own, being around love ones or committing to charity work. There is no right or wrong. In the end the ways we gain more self-respect are just as diverse as us ourselves – and therefore never fully perfect.
