Love.
We chase it, we fear it, we break ourselves apart trying to hold onto it. And yet, the most critical love story of your life, the one that dictates every other relationship you’ll ever have, is the one you have with yourself.
I know. Self-love sounds like a buzzword, a concept wrapped in pink ribbons and self-help clichés. But strip away the fluff, and here’s the raw truth: If you don’t love yourself, you won’t trust anyone who tries to love you. You’ll be waiting for the inevitable betrayal, the moment they realise you’re not worth it. You’ll sabotage, shrink, or settle, because deep down, you won’t believe you deserve more.
Loving yourself isn’t about feeling good all the time. It’s about facing yourself - fully, brutally, and without excuse. It’s about making peace with the parts of you that are inconvenient, painful, and unpolished. Because if you can’t sit with your own reality, how can you expect anyone else to?
What Does ‘Loving Yourself’ Actually Mean?
It’s not a spa day. It’s not whispering sweet nothings to your reflection. It’s not an Instagrammable moment of "choosing me."
Real self-love is the messy, uncomfortable truth that you’re going to have to look at yourself with a clear eye. It’s recognising your flaws and failures and still choosing to love the whole package - not just the parts that are easy to like. Self-love is the act of not turning away from yourself, even when you’re struggling, even when you’ve failed, even when you’re not living up to your own expectations. It’s choosing to believe that you have intrinsic value regardless of all that.
It’s not just about what you do - it’s about who you are. Your worth doesn’t shift because of your successes or your mistakes. It’s constant. It doesn’t require earning or proving. It just requires you to decide that you matter. And that’s not always easy, especially when you’ve been conditioned to doubt your own value.
Stop Telling Yourself You're Fine When You're Not
Radical self-love means telling yourself the truth - especially when it’s uncomfortable. Stop brushing off your pain. Stop telling yourself “it’s fine” when it’s not. Stop minimising your own suffering just because someone else might have it worse.
We’ve been trained to push our feelings aside, to keep moving, to not make a fuss. But ignoring what you feel doesn’t make it go away, it just buries it deeper, where it festers.
Being strong isn’t about pretending everything is okay. It’s about being able to sit with your feelings, no matter how raw, and actually listen to what they’re telling you.
If something hurts, acknowledge it. If you’re exhausted, stop pushing. If you’re unhappy, stop convincing yourself that this is just the way things are. Holding space for your emotions - all of them - is part of loving yourself. You don’t have to justify how you feel. You don’t need permission to be upset. What you feel is valid, and self-love means acting on that truth instead of stuffing it down.
Stop Treating Yourself Like a Problem
Self-love starts with acceptance. You are not a problem to be solved, a project to be fixed. You’re a human being. You are complex, flawed, and divine in your own right. Those flaws? They’re part of your story, your journey. They’re not meant to be hidden or shamed into silence. They are part of what makes you you. The key is to accept them - without using them as an excuse to tear yourself down.
If you spent as much time loving yourself as you do criticising yourself, imagine how much energy you’d free up. You’d feel more alive, more capable, and more at peace. But that takes intention - the willingness to stand in front of the mirror (literally or figuratively) and say:
“This is me, in all my glory and mess. And I’m worthy of love.”
The Brutal Work of Self-Love
Loving yourself isn’t passive. It’s not just waiting for confidence to show up or hoping one day you’ll wake up feeling whole. It’s work, the kind that will crack you open and force you to look at everything you’ve spent years avoiding.
Here’s where you start:
1. Accept That You Are Not an Exception to Worthiness
You are not the one person on this planet who is fundamentally unlovable. I promise. The idea that you’re somehow different, too damaged, too complicated, too much or not enough, is a lie. And the sooner you recognise it as a lie, the sooner you stop making choices from a place of self-rejection.
2. Face Your Bullshit
Self-love doesn’t mean turning a blind eye to your flaws. It means looking at them directly, acknowledging where you’ve fallen short, and choosing growth instead of shame. It’s easier to label yourself as "broken" than to admit you’re avoiding change. Stop hiding behind self-loathing. Do the work.
3. Stop Performing for Love
You don’t have to twist yourself into a shape that makes other people comfortable. If your relationships rely on you being anything other than who you are, then they aren’t real connections - they’re transactions. Give up the exhausting need to be liked and focus on being known.
4. Set Boundaries Like Your Life Depends on It (Because It Does)
Love without boundaries is self-abandonment. Stop giving endless access to people who drain you. Stop justifying their behaviour. Protect your time, your energy, and your mental peace like they’re sacred - because they are.
5. Talk to Yourself Like You Would Someone You Love
Your inner voice is shaping your reality. If you spend all day mentally tearing yourself down, don’t be surprised when you struggle to feel worthy of good things. You don’t have to be delusionally positive—just fair. Would you speak to your best friend the way you speak to yourself? No? Then fix it.
6. Forgive Yourself (Yes, Even for That Thing)
You are not defined by your worst moment. Stop punishing yourself for things you can’t undo. Take accountability, learn the lesson, and let yourself move forward.
7. Make Peace With Being Seen
Loving yourself means letting yourself exist. Without apology, without editing, without waiting for permission. Be loud. Take up space. You don’t need to earn the right to be here.
8. Drop the Fairytale and Get Real About Love
You want deep, unwavering love? Then be willing to receive it. Let people care about you. Let them show up. Stop testing them to see if they’ll leave. Stop pushing them away to prove yourself right. Love isn’t something you trick people into giving you, it’s something you allow.
The Hardest Truth About Self-Love
Some days, it will feel impossible. You will slip into old patterns. You will have moments where you don’t believe a single word of this. That’s okay. The goal isn’t to feel worthy every second of every day, it’s to choose yourself even when you don’t.
Because at the end of the day, no one is coming to save you. No relationship, no external validation, no grand moment of recognition will fix what only you can heal.
You have to do the work. You have to choose yourself. And you have to decide, right now, that you are worth it.
Not someday. Not when you’ve "fixed" everything. Right now.
Even if you don’t believe it yet, start acting like you do.
The love you want? The life you crave? The peace you’re desperate for?
It starts with you.
“Authenticity is the daily practice of letting go of who we think we’re supposed to be and embracing who we are.” Brené Brown
Can we truly learn to love ourselves by following these steps? Yes, but only if we commit to them, not just as ideas, but as daily practices. And only if we acknowledge what’s missing in the conversation around self-love.
Because here’s the thing: Self-love isn’t just about doing the work. It’s about undoing everything that taught you not to love yourself in the first place.
What’s Missing? The Deepest Work of Self-Love
We’ve covered the core elements: acceptance, boundaries, self-talk, emotional honesty. But if radical self-love was as simple as following steps, wouldn’t we all be healed by now?
So what’s the missing piece?
1. Acknowledging the Wounds That Made You Forget Your Worth
Before we can love ourselves, we have to be willing to grieve for all the times we weren’t loved the way we needed to be.
Loving yourself isn’t just about talking nicely to yourself in the mirror, it’s about facing the real reasons why you struggle to love yourself in the first place. The unmet childhood needs. The ways you were ignored, dismissed, abandoned, or criticised. The times love felt like something you had to earn. The relationships that mirrored those wounds and deepened them.
You can’t slap self-love on top of unhealed pain. It won’t stick.
Before you can love yourself fully, you have to acknowledge where that love was missing. You have to allow yourself to grieve what you didn’t get, what you needed, what you deserved.
Otherwise, you’ll keep looking for external love to “prove” your worth instead of knowing it’s already yours.
2. Facing the Fear of What Happens When You Stop Hating Yourself
Self-hatred can feel like a form of control.
If you criticise yourself first, no one else can hurt you. If you set your expectations low, you won’t be disappointed. If you tell yourself you’re not good enough, you won’t have to risk failure.
So what happens when you let that go?
What happens when you stop keeping yourself small? When you no longer beat yourself down before the world can?
Radical self-love is terrifying because it means surrendering the illusion of control that self-loathing gives you. It means taking up space without apology. It means stepping into the unknown, without the armour of self-rejection.
And if you’ve spent years identifying with your struggles, your insecurities, your failures - who are you without them?
That’s the fear we don’t talk about.
3. Unlearning the Idea That Love Must Be Earned
Many of us were raised to believe love is conditional, that it must be proven, performed, or deserved.
Self-love requires unlearning that.
You don’t have to be “good enough” to be worthy. You don’t have to achieve anything to deserve kindness - from yourself or anyone else. You don’t have to hustle for your own approval.
The work of radical self-love isn’t just about adding new habits, it’s about removing the beliefs that tell you your worth is negotiable.
Love isn’t something you unlock when you become better. It’s something you decide you deserve, right now, as you are.
Can We Really Learn to Love Ourselves?
Yes. But it’s not just about following steps.
It’s about facing the roots of your self-rejection. It’s about being radically honest about what shaped you. It’s about grieving what was missing so you can move forward. It’s about letting go of control and choosing to be seen.
Self-love isn’t just an act. It’s a process of undoing.
And it starts when you stop waiting to be worthy.
Venus & The Work of Loving Yourself
Self-love isn’t just a switch you flip. It’s a process. One that asks you to truly see yourself, to witness your own longing, your pain, your patterns. It’s about learning where you abandon yourself, where you silence your needs, where you chase validation instead of offering it to yourself. It’s the slow, deliberate work of peeling back the layers of conditioning, the survival mechanisms, the beliefs that tell you you are not enough as you are.
Venus in your birth chart holds the map to this work. She reveals how you love, yes, but more importantly, how you need to be loved. What makes you feel valued, what wounds you carry in your relationships, what beauty and pleasure mean to you on the deepest level. Your Venus story is personal. It’s layered with history, with lessons, with the ways you’ve learned to give and receive love. And understanding it can be a powerful step toward self-acceptance.
If you want to explore this in a deeper, more meaningful way, my Venus readings are not about surface-level compatibility or quick-fix affirmations. They are an invitation to see yourself clearly, to understand what nourishes you, what depletes you, and how to love yourself in a way that isn’t performative, but real. Because when you begin to love yourself in the way you truly need, you stop grasping for it in places that will never satisfy you.
You deserve that. You always have. And if you’re ready to start, I’d love to help you find your way back to yourself.
A note on AI & my writing:
I use ChatGPT as a writing assistant—not as a writer. These are my thoughts, ideas, and words, shaped by my lived experience and deep love for self-work, self-awareness, the spiritual journey, and astrology. AI helps me refine, structure, and occasionally nudge me toward better phrasing, but the voice you’re reading is mine. I use it as a tool to help me put into words everything I believe is valuable in sharing my insights. Honesty matters to me, and this is simply one way I bring my thoughts to life.
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