Backstory:

Yesterday, I wrote a Steemit article about my 7 day vlogging experience and when I wrote out the last paragraph, it really stuck out to me as a core component of my experience.

Here's the part I'm referring to...

"It’s easy to become a martyr when you’re creating things, especially if they mean something special to you. Ultimately this subtle sense of self punishment is based in expectations that you will never be able to live up to. Interestingly enough, when you let go of those expectations you end up finding yourself in a world that operates off of a completely different rule set, devoid of any needs and desires that you had previously clung to. I noticed this happening a lot for myself. There were subconscious expectations that I was failing to live up to. These aspects were very familiar to me as I’ve experienced them in the past and they were the source of some of my greatest creative frustrations. In this seven day cycle I let those parts of me go. I said fuck it numerous times. I stopped caring as much about what others would think of me or what I thought of myself. I just accepted myself and loved the very essence of that which I am. And when I did, I felt a lot better...and my art got better… and I am a better person because of it."

Photo by Xan Griffin @xangriffin

That realization led to the remembrance of a totally random, yet kind-of-mind-blowing experience.

Let me share!

The idea of loving myself more has been a pattern that has been coming up more frequently for me. Sometimes, when I'm stressed in life and just could use some spontaneous inspiration, I'll pull a tarot card.

I did that yesterday and the "advice" card I pulled was "self-forgiveness", which is essentially self-love. This prompted me to ask myself...how could I love myself more? And I listed off a few ways I could do that.

This led me to the remembrance of my kind-of-crazy experience a few weeks back when I made the decision to love my hair (random I know).

One day I realized that my hair is the part of myself that I really just don’t like. I have big fat curly greek hair and it’s frequently frizzy, out of control, and resistant to any form of product I had ever experimented with.

Ever since I was young, it’s been a part of me that I’ve really disliked.

This specific body “issue” led to a lot of self-confidence issues for myself and I knew it was still a strong source of my personal insecurities.

So one day I chose to love my hair.

I didn’t know how to do that, but the first thing that came to my mind as to how to do that was to seek advice for how to better love how my hair looks and feels.

A random barber shop popped into my mind. I had never been there before so I called them and asked for someone who specialized in curly hair. They said they had someone for me.

When I showed up I sat down and immediately found myself immersed in a great conversation with the lady cutting my hair.

She was super cool and our conversation was lively and intriguing. About ten minutes in she asked me where I was from and I said "Wisconsin." She said, "oh really? me too! where specifically?" I said "Pewaukee, it's a small town near Milwaukee." She said "OMG are you serious? I grew up there too!"

That was quite a fascinating experience for me. I chose to love myself, then was inspired to go to a random barber shop where the barber was not only super cool, but also lived in my random home town. WTF!

But that wasn’t the end of it...

Even better...she recommended this hair cream to me that has been TRULY effective for me. Before this instance, nothing has worked for my hair and BOOM...suddenly I found what I needed.

Of course my hair wasn't perfect because of the cream. I still had to do some work as my perfectionist brain would still judge. The product gave me a nice platform to work off of, I still needed to do the work to really love myself.

I was given an opportunity to do just that a few days later when I was filming the first blog for a project I created called “Cycle Up”.

I was filming a video promo for it and that morning and right before I was about to film I realized that my hair was just absolutely out of control.

At that point I knew I had two choices: 1) to not film and give into my insecurities, or 2) say fuck it and just accept myself.

Thankfully I chose the latter. If you watch the video below you’ll see that in just the first five seconds of that video I say "I have crazy hair and now I'm gonna share something crazy with you."

That was me accepting my insecurity.

Instead of trying to hide it, I just totally accepted it and made it as part of the gimmick of my intro.

By doing that I discovered a lot of power. Because I had accepted myself at a “low”, now I only could go straight up!

Suddenly I was free to be me and, as you’ll see in that video, it led to me creating a truly authentic video that I was really proud of.

So in conclusion, these experiences have inspired me to explore myself more. Starting tomorrow, as a part of my next cycle experience for the Cycle Up project, I will do one specific thing to love myself every day, for the next seven days.

Right now I have no idea what that will look like, but I will tell you this...

I’m truly excited to find out :)

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