As one of my favourite Instagram quotes goes, “You are enough. You are so enough. It is unbelievable how enough you are.”
Every year we are bombarded with messages of “New Year New You.” That when the clock strikes midnight on January 1st you have to start transforming into the brightest, sparkliest, perfect version of yourself. Your old self must be binned off with all the mistakes and failings of the previous 12 months forgotten and left behind with your previous inferior self. This is the moment to set the whole tone for the year, to decide how it is going to go and commit fully to pushing forward. It’s completely exhausting.
The idea that if we don’t seize this opportunity to make the changes we want we might get stuck the way we are for another year, can go straight in the bin. Because who you are right now, is fantastic. Thus far, you’ve done really well. You got yourself to here, to this point, reading this. You have learnt incredible lessons, achieved wonderful things and kept yourself alive on this planet. You got through all of your very worst days, months and years to get to now. This wonderful shiny version of yourself. You don’t need fixing or changing, you just need to know right now you are the best you’ve ever been. Because there is no other time but now and now is where all the good stuff happens.
You are making little changes every single day. There are tiny wins that propel you forward all of the time. We just don’t notice them because we are too focused on the big fat goals we’ve set up for ourselves. There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve, but the danger is we get stuck on becoming that future self and forget who we are right now. If we’re fixating on becoming an improved version of ourselves, it’s easy to dismiss the current self as inferior or just not good enough.
You don’t have to wait to live your best life. You don’t have to put yourself on hold waiting for things to fall into place. You don’t have to wait any longer to appreciate who you are or waste any more time hating parts of yourself and wishing they would change. Eradicate that feeling of not being good enough by celebrating all of the things you achieve every single day. Self-celebration isn’t about waiting until big massive changes have happened. It’s about celebrating who you are right now and how well you are doing.
Rather than looking at all of things you want to change and better about yourself, let’s do a review of things that went well over the last 12 months. Really try and place yourself in the feeling of a certain time and remember something that was really good, no matter how tiny. If it helps to go back over the months and choose one thing from each month, try it that way. I find looking back over social posts or my diary really helpful to remind me what I did. Did you overcome a really difficult morning? Perfected a new recipe (even if it was only an omelette!!?) Got a friend’s birthday card to them on time? Wrapped even one single Christmas present? All of these things added up to your glorious year so let’s honour them. Let’s celebrate all of the things that you did and how brilliant you were in the last 12 months.
Right now you are doing your best. You are the best version of yourself to date. You were enough, you are enough and you always will be enough. So in 2019 don’t beat yourself up for all of the things you haven’t done, instead celebrate the incredible things you do all the time.