Buy Yourself the Damn Flowers: The Self-Love Guide to Growing, Healing and Learning to Put Yourself First

Not every experience is meant to last forever. We are simply limited episodes in the multi-season stories of each other’s lives.

You do not crave partnership, you crave connection and because you have not given it to yourself, you search for it in all the wrong places in pursuit of immediate gratification from another person.

People only treat you how you treat yourself.

More often than not, broken bonds are due to falling out of frequency with one another. When you cannot explain why you no longer talk or why things don’t feel the way they used to, it is because the frequency you are vibrating at no longer aligns with the frequency of that friendship. You are no longer a match for each other because your growth has taken you down a different path.

people are never ours, they are merely experiences given to us for the timelines we need them – not want them. When you finally release expectations of others and instead only focus on what you can control (yourself), your life will no longer be constrained by another person’s actions.

Was it really right person, wrong time or just wrong person, right lesson?

When you allow the desire for ease to guide you, you will always be led astray.

When you are afraid of living differently or standing out, you put the power in other people’s hands. But when you operate from a place of self-love, you focus on your own opinions first.

You can’t help but fall completely in love with yourself once you’ve developed the self-respect to always do what you first intended and live for the benefit of who you are growing into instead of in fear of what the past used to tell you. Eventually, you become unrecognisable, and the people who once had you self-doubting are long forgotten.

Nowadays, I no longer look at hardships as a personal problem but rather a gift from the universe that allows me to learn the necessary resilience and lessons needed at this stage so I can progress onto the next level. You can’t just dream about where you want to be, you have to be the kind of person who’s ready for that lifestyle and every challenge that comes with it. Embracing your obstacles is the only way to get there.

I stopped expecting instant results and using each failed attempt to define whether I was capable. It’s okay to fall down a few hundred times in a row because there’s always the chance that I win the 386th time I try. And even if I don’t, it’s still all part of the journey of trying new things, removing the things that don’t serve me, learning more about what I want and building a better foundation to conquer the next pursuit that truly matters.

Daydreaming about a reality where you get everything you want is such a powerful manifestation tool because your brain cannot tell the difference between a real or imagined experience, so it starts building the necessary neural pathways and thought patterns needed to attract that lifestyle.

I realised the past doesn’t exist; it is simply an accumulation of memories in my mind that receives whatever level of attention that I decide. So I adjusted that focus to ‘future memories’, which is the process of imagining your future before it has even happened.

A high-value man may not become involved with a woman who lacks self-love because they’re not an energetic match. You only attract those that are vibrating at the same frequency as you. Insecure women will attract low-value men and high-value men will attract confident women who know their worth because they perceive themselves and the world in a similar way.

Self-love is letting go of your need to be understood and validated because you already give this to yourself. When you do, you remain peaceful while maintaining familial relationships and you meet your parents where they have met themselves.

When you love yourself, you are more capable of living life to the fullest because your focus is wholeheartedly on yourself.

When you feel insecure, it’s easier to seek out confidence in the things that are easier to strategise and ‘win’, like achieving goals. It reassures you and makes you feel like a success, whereas self-love lacks this element and that’s what makes it feel so hard. Using your appearance and successes as a crutch to feel more confident will fail as soon as you have a day when you don’t feel like you look good or you don’t achieve what you wanted to, whereas when you base your confidence on who you are internally, no one can get in the way of that. You become untouchable. This is achieved through viewing yourself via your self-defining qualifies: your values, personality, mindset and ability to love. It starts with resilience.

Realising this changed my life. I was only hurt by other people because I was putting them on a pedestal. When I saw that someone being so concerned with bringing you down is essentially them announcing their own self-hatred, I stopped taking everything so personally.

I am fully aware of all the obstacles to come and I welcome them, because they won’t break me, they’ll make me 10 times stronger. There has never been an adversity that I didn’t bounce back from as a 2.0 version of myself, regardless of the time it took to get there.

Giving love at the expense of your feelings is not love, it is hatred towards yourself.

After all, every single person you know views you differently, through their own lens, which is altered by their individual life experiences, trauma and mindsets. YOU are the only one who’s been by your side your entire life. You know every trial and tribulation you’ve been through. No one can ever compete with that – not your parents, not your sibling, not your childhood best friend. You will know yourself more than anybody else could even try to. But it must be your choice to hone that gift and develop it as time goes on.

To master self-acceptance, you must reach a state of mind where you understand that nothing about you is either ‘good’ nor ‘bad’.

Detachment isn't about negating all your negative emotions and it certainly isn't about shaming yourself for missing someone years after the break up. Detachment is the process of viewing your emotional reactions objectively instead of taking them as truth. Because more progressive healing takes place when you start to observe why you might be feeling a certain way and what could be causing it, rather than trying to avoid the emotion altogether. When you carry the emotional weight of shame and guilt, you're physically harming yourself.

Nothing is ever personal. People are complex and dealing with a dozen things that you know nothing about. You have no idea of their demons, insecurities and limiting beliefs that encourage them to act in the way they do. People are only ever trying to act in their own best interests – it’s got nothing to do with intentionally hurting you.