Question Of The Day

Do you truly love yourself?

Maybe you let him beat you down both mentally and physically because you don’t truly love yourself. Maybe you are a promiscuous woman because you don’t truly love yourself. And maybe most of the problems that Black women face within our community are the result of us not truly loving ourselves.

The journey to get to the place where you truly love yourself and embrace all the imperfections and flaws that you think you may have, can be a long and difficult one. It’s a journey that so many women take regardless of their skin color, but a journey that appears on the surface to impact the lives of Black women a little deeper.

We are all aware of the standards of beauty that our society has forced upon us throughout history and our society continues to promote a standard of beauty that is not inclusive to everyone. Black women often find themselves not meeting the criteria for those imposed standards and the result is a misperception in our community about what true beauty really is. I have no doubt that how we view ourselves esthetically affects how much we are able to truly love ourselves.

I was once subconsciously affected by the images I saw everywhere that suggested to me what beauty looks like. Not aware of that fact at the time, I started to pay a little more attention to my nose. I felt that if I had a better shape noise, a more “European” nose perhaps, I would look more beautiful. It took many years later for me to realize that the nose I was born with was perfectly fine. The quest for a better nose prevented me from truly loving myself.

There‘s no cure all or an antidote that we can take to make us truly love ourselves. But the first step we can take is to realize that loving ourselves is important and we must begin to tackle self-hatred at the core.

We are beautiful and we have to begin to understand that the negative way we feel about ourselves or not truly loving ourselves keeps us from reaching our full potential in life. So I ask today, “Do you truly love yourself?” If the answer is no, I encourage you to go on a journey to discover what is preventing you from truly loving you. And I ask that today, you begin to tackle whatever that is at the core.