Self-esteem is the assurance you have in your own worth and abilities. In other words it is as to how much you love, understand, believe and value yourself. Now picture hating your own self for almost 7-8 years of your life! Well, each one of us had a love-hate relationship with ourselves at some point of time in life but hating yourself each and every single moment is pretty much the worst thing to do.

So this is what i really went through. I spent my childhood and half of my teenage hating myself and thinking that I need to be someone else to be liked by people. Every single day and every moment that i lived back then was a struggle to be a better daughter, better student, better friend, better and a beautiful looking version of myself and so on… I thought if things were to be better, then may be people would like me and then maybe I’d like myself too.

I was then being extremely harsh on myself, over thinking about all the bad things and ignoring the good stuff about myself and it affected me in various ways:

• I was miserable and did not really have confidence in myself or anything in fact
• I was never satisfied with anything I did and that stressed me out
• There was a tremendous struggle to become a better version of myself
• I struggled to maintain my relationship with others, including family and close friends
• It affected my grades
• I started feeling worthless and weak and become distant from others

It was after all this that caused me to have an urge to be better but this time for real, for overcoming the low-self-esteem I had and so there were things that I did which turned me into the person I am now:

• Focused more on my positive qualities than on the negatives and in fact learn from those negative aspects
• Decide to learn something from each and every single quality I had rather than judging myself
• Being happy, encouraged and less stressed about what would people think of me (the main stigma I had), I chose to think that my identity is not based on what people think of me, instead it’s about who I really wanted to be and I wanted to be myself–stronger and a bold version of myself (which yes, I am one today)
• I definitely love myself more than ever, my confidence has risen along with the self-worth, also I appreciate myself, my skills and my abilities rather comparing to others
• I always make the preference to stay strong and learn from my experiences.

Concludingly, I can say that the key was to have faith and trust in yourself and your abilities, rather being restrained of what would people say? Also, always know that you are stronger even more than you think and people will always try to put you down when they know you can make them loose. Well, this was me and if you are finding it hard to deal with such issues, you should seek help from a professional who would help you raise your self-esteem in ways you want it to.