My Insecurities: Finding Acceptance in Yourself

A Letter to My Insecurities

If I could write a letter to my younger self, the very first thing would say: “Accept yourself”. It’s a natural human tendency to want to gain the approval from others because, we’re scared of being rejected and fighting life’s challenges all on our own. However, there does come a point where people can get too self-reliant on other’s opinions, and it can become very personally unhealthy for the individual. For me, it reached a point where most of my actions would be based off of how other people would react, and think of me. I would change the way I behaved and spoke in front of certain people, just so they could accept and relate to me more. This hindered my self-expression, as I would live my life as basically as possible to avoid offending most people.

Accepting Myself

I missed out on showing others what truly mattered to me, and the world missed out on what I had to give. Reacting like this for most of my life, slowly deluged my personal opinions of myself. I would always find more excuses on why I shouldn’t speak or act up, as I only looked at the things people would probably not like about me, than what they would. I would only be able to focus on the negative, and never the positive aspects of myself. The “focus” soon slowly turned into “obsess”, and I became over-occupied with my hurtful mindset of myself. There were points where I would be on my way to social events, but later turned back home because I was so overwhelmed with my insecurities, and didn’t have the courage to confront them. Not until a couple years ago, I realized that my insecurities existed, not because someone else pointed it out, but because I did. The problem was never with “everybody else”. It was with me. Learning not to care about what others thought was different than learning to value what I thought. I needed to accept myself before I could see any changes in my life. And so I tried. Of course, it was challenging make such an extreme personal shift all at once, but I had to.

It took about a year and a half of trying to accept myself, before I could be completely comfortable with all of me. If I could tell my younger self to accept who I was, all my insecurities would have been much more easily ignored, and I would have never missed out on as many experiences and on as much time as I did—if only I could.