When I first told my friends I wanted to create a wellness platform they all laughed at me and said it couldn’t be possible. I tried to explain that there are people in this world who are so focused on physical beauty that they have no time for their mental health. It hit a nerve with them because they have seen it so many times. How could someone who was so into physical beauty get behind a movement that promotes mental health?
When I got really serious about learning how my mental health broke me down, I realized I was at the point where I didn’t want to be the first woman ever to have a mental health breakdown. Women don’t talk about their problems, especially in the open, and they tend to internalize everything. Friends would sometimes tease them about being bipolar, but no one really wants to talk about it. Women need to be supportive and encouraging when their loved ones have a mental health breakdown like I did. Sometimes it takes the support of others to realize what you are going through.
Women often internalize their feelings and put themselves down when they have a mental health breakdown. They believe they are worthless and inadequate. I learned this while suffering from my mental health breakdown. People assume I was just weird. I learned how damaging and destructive this attitude is by realizing how I was hurting myself every time I criticized myself.
I learned how to love myself by realizing how much I needed the love and support from family, friends, and strangers. I realized I had to love myself first. By improving my self-esteem I also improved my life and the lives of those around me. I finally learned how my mental health breakdown started. It all started with a lack of self-esteem and self-love.
This is why I say self-esteem is the mother of happiness. You can have all the money in the world, a great relationship, a healthy body, and a great social life – all without a good self-image or a high level of self-esteem. If you lack self-esteem, you will find that your relationships, health, and finances suffer as well.
One of the ways to improve self-esteem and improve your self-love is to write often. By writing daily, you focus on the things that make you happy and strengthen your resolve to feel better and do better. Think of the things that lift you up and remind you of who you really are. The more you remind yourself of who you are, the better you will feel about yourself.
My second step on the road to self-love and self-esteem was to focus on my successes. There was a huge imbalance in my thinking about myself and my successes. In order to develop self-love and self-esteem, you have to start to value yourself and what you have to offer. For me, that meant improving my grades, being more organized, getting better grades, developing positive habits, and getting more organized around the school. All these things improved my self-esteem and my confidence.
Finally, I had to get clear about how my mental health breakdown started. That’s when I finally realized I was treating my mental health decline like an emotional issue. It was a big mistake. What I learned is that I can treat mental health breakdowns like a physical problem by addressing the physical needs.
So what did I do? I started with self-love. It’s really not that hard. You just have to learn to focus on yourself. When you start to focus on yourself, you automatically get more self-love.
In the beginning, self-love will help you build your self-esteem and your confidence. As you build these things, your confidence and self-love will follow. It’s like they’re married to your success. When you want to have more success, you have to have more confidence and self-love. That’s how I got from my low self-esteem to have very high self-esteem.
This mental health breakdown that I had was, thankfully, short-lived. But it left me with some big holes in my foundation. If I continue to let these kinds of setbacks keep me from reaching my goals, I’m never going to make it anywhere. My motto is “keep working even when you don’t feel like it”. And I do mean working – all the time.
