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[queenonthemove]

today’s mood.

[queenonthemove]

Hello. Welcome. Are you comfortable? Need anything? Water? Tea? Vodka (it’s 5 o’clock somewhere amirite)? All settled in, then? Great. Here we go. 

As the title and my bio suggest, this is my journey. To figuring out self love and self acceptance. And general badassery.

The past two or so years have been ROUGH to say the least. Between graduating from college, figuring out how to quit a job that made me miserable, dealing with multiple health issues as a result of said job, and learning how to “adult”, the list is endless. It wasn’t until I finally managed to quit that job and move back in with my parents that I decided “yes. I will turn my life around. Self love is the way to go. Learning to love myself will make everything better”. I credit most of this to reading Year of Yes by queen Shonda Rhimes (thank you for being a voice for us fellow introverted black girls struggling to find their place in the world). After following a multitude of self love and lifestyle blogs and instagram accounts dedicated to meditation and “focusing inward”, I thought self love and acceptance would come quickly and naturally to me and my troubles would be washed away with each exhale.

What those bloggers and instagrammers don’t always tell you is that this shit is HARD. You can’t just wake up one day and say “ooooh I love you, dry hair and lumpy thighs and saggy boobs and flat feet and pimples!” It just doesn’t work like that. Unfortunately. 

I am slowly learning that self love, self care and self acceptance is not simply an overnight experience; it’s not a magical cure to everything going wrong in your life. The self love journey is something that is incredibly unique to everyone. You cannot just copy a “self love night time routine” from your favorite YouTuber and immediately feel 100%. No matter how much you love yourself, you will still have some rough days or weeks or even months. 

Self love takes WORK. It takes time and dedicated and support from your loved ones. And this year, 2017, I decided to really take this self love journey by the balls and figure out me. Who I am. What I want. How I want to live. What impact I want to have on the world. 

So. If nobody ends up reading this, that’s okay. It’s not really for anyone else (though if anyone even finds one thing here that helps them in any way, then I will be happy). It’s for me, myself, and I. I hope that future Jackie can look back at this “journal” on her potato-chip sized computer while driving her hovercraft convertible (can we make this happen, Apple and Google??) and say “hey girl. Look at all that shit you went through. Look at where you’re at now. Good work. Now go get a taco - you deserve it”.