Day 4/31 of Self Love

Read this post for an explanation!

My Definition of Self Love - Learning not to hate yourself; being okay with past mistakes, but not repeating them; refusing to use current failures as fuel for self-hate and instead using them as opportunities to improve; and reminding yourself, "You are loved, you are valuable, and you are God's child."

A compliment I struggle to accept about myself is that I am smart. When I was in high school, my friends and I called ourselves the "nerds," but I was definitely one of the more average members of the group - the rest of my friends were highly intelligent people who could out-think me any day. Although I am very opinionated, I have always been too shy to speak my mind. (Growing up, I was that kid that often knew the answers, but wouldn't raise her hand.) Feeling intellectually inferior to my peers during my teenage years made me even more hesitant to assert my views.

The first time J told me I was "smart," I couldn't believe him - me, smart? But I didn't get scholarships for my ACT scores; I wasn't in college; I was fairly average, if that - how could he say that I was smart?

Since J and I were long distance for the majority of our relationship, we spent a lot of time talking over Skype, usually for hours at a time. After giving each other a detailed summary of our week, J would often share with me something he learned in school, a subject that he was musing about, or a question he had, and we would begin a length discussion. It surprised me to find someone who so valued my opinion, when I was by no means brilliant. But those simple conversations about anything and everything - from child dedications to mental disorders to dispensationalism - slowly built my confidence in myself.

Today, if someone tells me I am smart or intelligent, my knee-jerk response is still denial, but at least I don't faint in shock. Maybe one day I'll be able to say, "Thank you."