Personal Perspectives
Loving Myself Instead of Unrealistic Resolutions
Personal Perspective: It's a natural moment for reflection.
Posted February 4, 2025 Reviewed by Lybi Ma
Key points
- I've been on an extensive journey to find healing and transformation after trauma and loss.
- Turning toward myself with self-love leads the way to authenticity, joy, and contentment.
- Setting boundaries is an essential act of self-love and a key to feeling whole.
I’m writing to you from a space of newness, not just because it is a New Year, but because it feels like I’m walking toward a new self. As I do, I’m not shedding my old self. I’m embracing all the selves I have ever been.
In my long career as a science writer, I’ve been on an exhaustive (but never exhausting) search to transform in the aftermath of trauma and loss. Life has often seemed tenuous from where I’ve stood. The tragic death of my young father when I was a child. The terrifying near loss of my newborn son as a young mother. The heartbreaking illness that threatened to take my teenage daughter. Through all those years, or perhaps because of those experiences, and my worry that the people I love most might slip away, it has always seemed to me that we are here, in our brief time, to touch as deeply as we can into love.
Love sparks life. The jolt of love we feel when our child’s hand nestles in ours. Flickers of moments of a deep, abiding connection with partners or friends who come to know us beneath the costumes we put on to be “in the world.” These moments—where life is felt most, held, treasured, and remembered—give birth to that thing we call our collective consciousness, our indelible human connectedness. It is in this neurobiological dance of our togetherness that life is made new, again and again.
I know this to be true, having lost a parent when I was 12. The love I felt from my father never died, even when he did. The power of his love was made all the more knowable by its absence.
It has been a calling in my life to extend my love in a way that is felt, and that matters to the people around me, across the whole of our lives.
Giving Too Much
But here’s the thing. Sometimes, I go too far. I extend concern and compassion to people who do not deserve to know me in that way. I’ve struggled over the years to draw lines between what I will allow, and what others want me to do or give or be. In my life of near-loss, in my fear of loss, I have overcorrected and given too much away, and too little to myself.
The start of a new year offers a natural moment for reflection. While societal pressures and outside voices often push for a dramatic change or a ‘new you,’ consider embracing this time as a gentle invitation to look inward instead. Focusing on our inner lives, what we love and want to build more of, and what we want to move on from, sweep out of our lives; the things that no longer serve us.
This year, I have been moving further into my healing, beyond self-fixing, to a more primal, internal listening to a whisper that, when I hear it, lets me know what I want to devote myself to in my work and my writing, what I do and do not want to do, who I do and do not want to be with, what behavior I will accept from others, and what it is that I must voice if I am to be heard and if I am to respect myself. The boundaries I must set if I hope to be whole.
If you sense things you’d like to let go of, consider exploring your sense of satisfaction and well-being in your daily life.
Here are a few prompts to help you as you do this:
What would you like to experience more or less in your moment-to-moment life? Perhaps it’s the ability to have more fun, be more spontaneous, feel more deserving of good things in life, or to let go of old resentments.
Do you feel you value the unique contributions you bring to the world? What are those contributions that emerge entirely from you being you? Make a quick list of the ones that fill you with real, abundant joy, and vow to lean into those passions a little more.
Despite your daily obligations and responsibilities, do you allow yourself to be spontaneous and playful without feeling guilty? How might you re-stack your day for spontaneity? Play? Laughter?
As you do this work of becoming more you, always do so with a sense of compassion for you, for all the selves you have ever been, and with appreciation for the braveness required for the journey to become whole.
References
If you found this post helpful, I hope you will join me on my Substack, Healing Together with Donna Jackson Nakazawa. I aim to create a warm and welcoming space to explore further the profound connections between our emotions, past experiences, and health.