Selfie Sunday: Strength

linking up with Joey for the first and most certainly not last Selfie Sunday

I love Joey's idea about giving ourselves more love and telling people what we do love about ourselves. I myself, as well as many others, can go on and rant about all the things I don't like about myself, the weight I want to lose or how I wish my hair was longer..but do you all really know what I love about myself from my posts? I would assume not, because I rarely indulge in the personality traits that I love about myself. 

In 1956, a psychologist and social philosopher named Erich Fromm defined what he thought self love meant. He said that loving oneself is different from being arrogant, conceited or egocentric. Self love means caring about yourself, taking responsibility for yourself, respecting yourself and knowing yourself. When he refers to knowing yourself he is meaning being realistic and honest about one's strength and weaknesses. 

Now, I am going to get really real here and really personal but isn't this what this link us is about to be true to yourself ?

When my mom died I had a lot of people telling me how sorry they were for me and telling me that it was OK for me to be depressed..but the thing was I wasn't depressed. But don't take that in the wrong sense. I wasn't depressed because my mom taught me to be strong and even though she left us in the physical world I know that she was with me Spiritually. It is weird but when situations arise and someone you know has lost a loved one you sit and think to yourself how you would react in that circumstance. And you want to know how I thought I would react? I had no idea but I knew I would be depressed and wasn't sure how I would be able to move on with my life. When my mom went into the hospital and we were getting updates from doctors and they weren't looking good, those thoughts came back into my head and I was starting to feel depressed. I shut my phone off and I felt like I was pushing everyone in my family away from me. I felt like if my mom passed away I was going to be alone and push Timmy away and push the closest people away from me and I could see myself going in the direction of sitting in a dark room on the floor crying.

But, that isn't what happened. I became a completely different person and was strong. My strength came out of nowhere. I couldn't believe I was doing OK, OK in the sense that I wasn't spiraling out of control..the fact that I was going to be able to make it through this. I pulled this strength out of nowhere to be strong for my 17 year old sister (16 at the time). We had both just lost our best friend and at the time it seemed like we were all we had left. I couldn't be the type of person to push away my family and deal with my moms death alone, I needed to be the strong person my mom taught me to be for my sister.

So now for giving myself some love. I am so proud of myself for how I was able to remain strong for my sister. There are many many times where I am not strong, but I am strong when I need to be and that is one thing I am very proud of. My mom passed down so many wonderful traits to me and being able to be strong for my sister is definitely one of them. Never would I have ever thought I would be able to learn to live with the pain. The movie The Fault in Our Stars really helped me learn that concept. Every day it is going to hurt to wake up and know my mom isn't here but I can't change that but I can choose to live my life and learn to live with the pain or I can choose to go down a different path of darkness and gloom. I have chosen to learn to live with the pain and so has my sister and I am so proud of both of us for how far we have come since my mom passed away 7 months ago.

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