Loving yourself

I started this blog expecting to write about code optimization and technical deep dives. Instead, I’m writing about love.

In my free time I keep working on a project that is related to my productivity-maxxing post and my own VS Code color scheme (I can’t believe I’ve never posted about this).

Instead of that what I’d like to ramble about is loving yourself and allowing yourself to make mistakes and just accept things the way they are. I had such high hopes, when I started this blog. I wanted to do multiple deep dives similar to my post about optimizing Python.

However, over and over again I felt like there are much more technically knowledgeable people that should make these type of posts. This doesn’t mean that I have no learnings to share though.

One of my greatest teachers has been my dog, Sophie. For her I never had to be the most knowledgeable developer. I didn’t even have to brush my teeth to earn her love and affection. Just had to spend time with her, provide food and a place to sleep near me.

This launched me down a path of self realization. What is really important in life? I think LOVE is the answer.

Let me tell you a story about Sophie. I adopted her and her brother with one of my best friends when they were 7. They were both aggressive to other dogs, they didn’t want to stop barking at others and fed off of one another’s aggression.

It took us years in the dog park and so many treats to replace her old feeling (which I think was fear) with love. It happened in stages, first she had to be okay to get close to others, then I got her curious in others and at that point love has won again!

There was however a single big difference between how Sophie and I loved. Like many others I would have considered myself my own biggest critic. I would ruminate in my own mistakes for a long while. Sophie didn’t ever show rumination, she only exists in the moment.

So what I wanted to really say with this post is that while people are usually supportive of others, I don’t think we spend enough time loving and accepting ourselves.

Be more like Sophie! Learn from your mistakes and then let them go, they will not serve you anymore!

There is no strength that didn’t start from some weakness. Every mistake we make means that we have room to improve and we are all trying to do our best in this life, be nice to yourself and treat others the way you wish they treated you!