Coming Home to Myself: A Self-Love Story Without Clichés

For a while now, we keep hearing the same sentence everywhere: “Love yourself.”

On social media, on book covers, in short videos, on colourful graphics…

As if there were a magic formula:

“Love yourself, everything will get better.”

But on some days, this sentence feels like a slap in the face.

Because inside you’re saying:

“How am I supposed to love myself like this?”

When you’re tired, scattered, when you’ve made mistakes, when you’re full of regret, when the people you’ve hurt and the ones who hurt you are still fresh…

Hearing the slogan is easy, turning it into reality is hard.

For me, the story of learning to love myself did not pass through pretty phrases, but through heavy confrontations.

There is a gap between the “Love Yourself” slogan and reality...

For a long time I thought loving myself meant being satisfied with myself.

When I was successful, when I was appreciated, when I looked strong, when I had “achieved” something, I believed I had earned the right to love myself.

On days when I had a bad time, when I made mistakes, when I felt messy, when I collapsed emotionally, another sentence would rise inside me:

“In this state, you are not lovable.”

No one ever said this to me that harshly.

I said it to myself.

That’s why the idea of self-love never quite sounded genuine to me.

Because I always imagined myself in my most put-together state.

And loving myself in that state didn’t feel that hard.

What was hard was this: Bearing to see myself in my most dishevelled state.

Do you have sentences you use as a reason not to love yourself?

The sentences we say to ourselves are like small cogs that slowly grind down our self-worth.

I realised this much later.

“Of course this would happen to you.”

“Who would bother with you anyway?”

“In this state, you don’t deserve anyone.”

“You’re always lacking.”

If I had said even one of these sentences to someone else, I would have felt uncomfortable for days.

But when I said them to myself over and over again, they started to feel normal.

Not loving myself wasn’t always a loud hatred; it was a sneaky kind of resignation.

“This is just how I am,” and making hurting myself a part of my life.

At some point I noticed this: I had gathered so much evidence not to love myself that I had stopped looking for even the smallest reason to be able to love myself.

Loving yourself is not about admiring your flawless version...

One day a sentence crossed my mind:

“I can’t love myself because I’m this flawed.”

Then I paused.

“If you were flawless, who would you be loving?” I asked myself.

Loving yourself is not about admiring your flawless version.

Loving yourself is learning not to reject your flawed version.

Loving yourself is not about never making mistakes; it is about not executing yourself when you do.

Loving yourself is not about never getting hurt; it is about not trampling over yourself when you are hurt.

Loving yourself is not about always standing strong; it is about counting even your weakest state as human.

I understood this very late.

When a person loves themselves, they don’t erase their flaws; they learn to hold them close as well.

Paths to Myself: Not from outside in, but from inside to inside.

While writing Paths to Myself, I realised that I had always looked for the road from the outside to the inside.

I believed I could reach myself through someone’s approval, someone’s love, someone’s admiration.

“If they love me, then I’ll love myself.”

“If they choose me, then I’ll see myself as worthy.”

“If they appreciate me, then I’ll give myself credit.”

This is an exhausting road.

Because it is constantly dependent on the outside.

And the outside is changeable.

But slowly, throughout the book, I saw this:

My road is not from outside to inside, but from inside to inside.

Paths to Myself mostly passes through the cracks where I stopped running away from myself.

Loving myself is not shining with light that comes from outside; it is opening, one by one, the doors of the rooms I have kept closed inside for years.

It feels like coming home...

I had always imagined returning to myself as finding a “new me.”

But the real feeling is not meeting someone new; it is like returning to a house you have neglected for a long time.

You open the door.

Inside, it’s a bit messy.

Some rooms are dusty.

In some drawers there are things you forgot.

Some rooms you’ve kept locked for years, afraid to open them.

But despite all the mess, this is your house.

Loving yourself is exactly like this:

Accepting every room, every corner, every mess of your house as “a part of me.”

In a life where you’ve walked around as if you were always a guest, sitting for the first time on your own couch, drinking water from your own glass, looking at your own walls…

Being able to invite even your incomplete, broken, tired self into the living room.

Self-worth is not an outcome, but a starting point...

For a long time I weighed myself like this:

“What did I do, what did I achieve, what did I offer?”

When the list of things I did grew, I felt valuable; when the list of things I couldn’t do got longer, I felt worthless.

As if self-worth were a report card we are given at the end of life.

But slowly I realised this: A person’s worth is not an outcome, it is a starting point.

A human being starts life already valuable; not in order to earn value.

What we call the healing journey is the long, tiring but real process of giving up trying to prove ourselves and accepting living as an already valuable being.

Loving yourself is not saying “Now I’m perfect”; it is taking a shy step towards being able to say, “I am a being who is lovable even with my flaws.”

Before I could love myself, I had to learn compassion...

The sentence “love yourself” still sounds big to me at times.

There are days when even carrying the word “love” feels heavy.

But I noticed this: Loving yourself is not always the first step.

First you learn to have compassion for yourself.

Having compassion for yourself is being able to say, “It’s understandable that you feel this way.”

Being able to say, “You made a mistake here, but this doesn’t stop you from being human.”

Being able to say, “Your exhaustion, your weakness, your falling apart do not make you worthless.”

Where you can be compassionate with yourself, one day the possibility of loving yourself also begins to sprout.

While reading these lines, you may be noticing this:

Your relationship with yourself is much harsher than your relationships with others.

You are more open to understanding, forgiving and listening to others; but when it comes to yourself, you cannot offer the same spaciousness.

Maybe that’s why I want to leave you with a small but heavy question:

When was the last time you were able to say “I’m glad you exist” to yourself?

Not just for an achievement; not just because you stayed strong; not just because you made everyone’s life easier…

But with the way you are right now, with your tiredness, your hurt, the parts of you that sometimes lose control:

“I’m glad you exist.”

Maybe you won’t be able to say it out loud.

Maybe even saying it silently inside will be hard.

But without changing the language you use towards yourself, the idea of loving yourself will always stay far away.

Maybe the story of loving yourself begins exactly here:

Where you take a step not to fix yourself, but to come closer to yourself.

For me, Paths to Myself was not an attempt to invent a new me, but an effort to return, layer by layer, to my own home, my own inner world, my own truth.

Beyond the clichés, I wanted to reach a place where I could simply say this:

“I still don’t really know how to love myself.

But I’m ready to stop hating myself.

And I think the journey home starts right here.”