Loving Who You Are: No Approval Seeking
Loving who you are is probably one of the most ignored actions of human beings. We want approval from others.
Everybody has insecurities, but we don’t accept them easily.
Instead, we engage in negative self-talk and scold ourselves for being insecure.
We want approval from others but even if they approve of us, we still feel empty.
In my short life, I have been wanting approval and I have realized that if I run after approval and care about what other people think of me, I’ll never truly be happy.
My Story: Birla High School
When I was in class 10, I studied hard to score 84.6%, and then in class 11 I got admitted into Birla High School(BHS), which is one of the most elite high schools in Kolkata and even India as a whole.
Part of the reason I got into BHS was to make my parents proud.
But I wasn’t proud of myself.
I got my parents’ temporary approval by getting into BHS, but I didn’t approve of myself.
I still disliked being lonely and I hated myself.
Furthermore, I hated my personality, my lack of confidence, my inability to make friends, my weakness of not being a leader and I didn’t like my stream of subject – science.
Not only that, but I even read multiple self-help books like “Psycho-Cybernetics” by Maxwell Maltz to “fix” myself. But nothing worked.
Because there was nothing to “fix”.
I needed to accept myself.
I needed to tell myself that I loved myself and that I was sorry for hating myself.
And then I needed to change my self-talk.
But I didn’t do any of these actions because I didn’t know how to do them.
I was lost back then.
Conclusion
Today, however, I have started to realize that no matter how much approval I seek, I’ll still feel empty inside.
First I need to accept myself fully.
I need to love myself.
I have an app on my phone called “Finch” and it is a to-do list app for neurodivergent people.
Likewise, I have a to-do item on it that says “Pause and say ‘thank you’ to myself”.
And I find it very soothing to thank myself every day.
So yeah, loving who you are is an underrated skill that everyone should learn.
Thank you for reading this line! It means a lot.