I have a secret that I don’t talk about a lot. I have a mild form of Pectus Excavatum which means that when I was born my chest was sunken in. As a kid, I feared changing in the locker room for gym because I didn’t want the other kids to make fun of me.

It was hard enough in that I was skinny and came from a divorced family. I felt different and people used to pick on me because of my weight and I wore glasses. In the ‘80s, I fit the textbook definition of a nerd. I read a lot, got good grades, wore glasses, and liked geeky things like Dungeons & Dragons. Add onto all that my sunken chest and I felt out of place.

Over the years, I learned to love myself for all of who I am—glasses, sunken chest, and all.

But that took lots of time, and if I could go back, I would have spent more time focusing on building up love for myself. I often felt broken, different, and could never understand why everyone seemed to have learned different things within their family. When you grow up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional family, you accept your upbringing as normal because you don’t know any better.

It wasn’t until high school and then in college that I understood that other families were entirely different from mine in more ways than I could understand.

Now that I’m an adult, I take time to exercise, focus on my mental well-being, and self-image. If you’ve also struggled with body image, I recommend that you pick up Sonya Renee Taylor‘s book The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love. Loving yourself might sound conceited or selfish, but that’s not the case if you balance your embracing self-love with giving love to others.

How often do we look to the typical standards of beauty set by the fashion and makeup industry rather than to reflect on loving ourselves for who we are and not what others think we should look like?

Building upon a set of skills that helps us mentally to overcome our past traumas, we also need to be comfortable in our own skin.

Body, mind, and soul—it’s the whole package that we need to be in love with as we go about our journey.

For today, what can you do to celebrate and appreciate who you are? Your body is your physical presence on this Earth and how we treat our bodies and the relationship we have with it is essential to our well-being.

The substances we put into our body, whether we sleep, exercise, and rest are all wrapped up into how willing we are to practice radical self-love.

As you go about your day, embrace who you are and uncover the true you. When we love all of who we are, that’s when we can shine.

Like what you’ve read? Be sure to check out my other posts in my Let Go and Be Free blog.