This is a story about my self love journey
and how I healed my sense of self worth.
I grew up feeling unworthy and unloved.
On the outside, I was just like any other kid,
but on the inside I was insecure,
and at times felt unvalued and abandoned, like no one cared about me.
I was also really shy,
so I didn't know how to speak up for myself and express my feelings either.
I kept a lot to myself.
Of course, I had a lot of positive moments in my childhood too,
but the negative ones created wounds that stuck,
because as a kid you don't know how to manage
those negative emotions and thoughts.
And they begin to contribute to the story you tell yourself in your mind about your life,
and that story shapes everything.
So much of this was a realization only later in life.
I didn't have the self awareness back then to understand what was going on.
I didn't understand that my negative mindset
and lack of self love held me back in so many ways.
I didn't feel confident with myself, my looks, my body, my personality.
I was so afraid of being judged by others.
I didn't want to be seen as weird.
I cared too much about what other people thought
and I didn't know how to have my own opinion or to think for myself.
My twenties were when I started learning to love myself.
First it was on building my self confidence,
then learning to listen to my inner voice and live authentically,
living the life that I want to live.
And more recently it's been on healing my old wounds around self-worth.
So much of my stress and anxiety, I realized,
was tied to my unstable sense of self worth,
Because of how I was raised,
I equated success with approval and love.
Failure was the scariest thing,
because it meant disapproval and being unloved.
Growing up with strict expectations,
I didn't feel loved unconditionally.
The love was definitely conditional.
Get good grades, go to a good school, get a good job.
Those things would get you approval,
the closest thing to love you get with Asian parents.
Failing at any of those was absolutely unacceptable.
You'd be banished:
“Dishonor on your cow, dishonor on your family,” all of that.
Not only that, but experiencing certain traumas as a child
had cultivated such low self worth in general.
So how did I heal my self worth and cultivate self-love?
A few things helped: Reflection, through lots of journaling, meditating.
Those two things helped me get still with my mind
and become more aware of my thoughts.
Reading books that opened my mind to how mindsets and emotional traumas work.
Giving myself space for self care and deep reflection.
Exercises like yoga and breath work.
Expressing myself through creativity, art, and fashion.
And doing things that bring me joy like singing, dancing, or hanging out with friends.
Many of you know I went on a trip to Bali to give myself space to heal.
I had a lot of breakthroughs there
about the thoughts that have been holding me back and giving me anxiety,
and all of those breakthroughs led me back to my self worth.
I'll share more in depth on the steps to healing in my next video,
which is going to be the healing workshop,
but basically: through my healing,
I learned to see myself and my past experiences with love.
I was honestly so moved.
It brought me to tears, like I was seeing how worthy I truly was for the first time.
I now can see my life in the bigger picture.
My journey was starting out as someone who didn't have much self-worth,
and I tended to seek love and worth from outside of myself.
And my whole life journey has been going from
that person who sought out external love and appreciation and approval,
to becoming someone to see my innate self worth
and truly, truly learn to see how beautiful I am,
how wonderful and worthy I am.
In my childhood, high school, and college, I loved to sing, I love to perform.
And part of that reason is probably because I loved the attention I got from people,
because I grew up feeling that my parents didn't love me as much as they could have.
I grew up feeling abandoned from my dad.
And I grew up feeling like I wasn't very worthy as a child.
I felt very invisible growing up.
And so when I had this talent for singing,
it got people's attention and I think innately I craved that.
And so a lot of my earlier years were about performing,
and I think I did it for that reason,
but I do have to thank my gifts of singing and music,
because it helped me build my confidence.
I started a YouTube channel singing in high school
and that's how I built my confidence to actually admit to people that I like singing,
because I kept it a secret my entire life.
I was so, so, so shy,
and it was through my gifts
that I let other people see me and I felt seen.
You guys know that I pursued music after college.
I thought that that's what I wanted to be,
but my path led me into what I'm doing now: personal growth.
And it's funny because I thought that I was supposed to be this performer, this artist.
Now as I'm getting more mature,
I realized that I don't need people's approval anymore.
And it's the journey of learning to give myself that self love and approval.
Here's something I wrote on Instagram about my breakthroughs:
“My personal journey can be summed up as:
from seeking love and worth without,
to finding love and worth within.
I grew up feeling unloved and felt like love was something I had to earn and work for.
I felt like I had to prove myself in order to be loved.
Success meant survival because failure meant lack of love.
I was insecure and struggled with not feeling good enough.
Over years of healing and growth,
I've come to recognize just how worthy I am.
I was always so beautiful and so worthy.
I just didn't see it.
I don't have to do anything or prove myself.
My worth is innate and cannot be taken away.
I felt this so deeply that words don't do it justice."
Basically all of my healing experiences have led me to the same place:
this reminder that I am worthy.
I was worthy all along.
I was loved all along.
I was beautiful all along.
I never had to try.
I never had to prove myself.
I never had to change myself in order to receive love and approval and self worth.
All of that was already innately in me.
And it might sound really simple at the surface level,
but the way that I felt that truth was so deep and so profound –
my eyes opened like, “Oh my god, I cannot believe I didn't see this before.”
Like, it was there all along.
And I feel like that is this journey that we all are on,
we all have to go through to come back to ourselves,
to find ourselves again, to find the love that we have within,
to find our worth that we have within.
Always remember that self love is a journey.
It's not something you work on once and then you're good, you're done, you've got it.
It's something that you have to work on every single day,
to have a more positive conversation with yourself,
to remind yourself that you are worthy,
you are loved, you are beautiful,
and that you really enjoy being yourself on earth.
You enjoy living the life that you're living now
because if you don't appreciate yourself,
then the energy that you spread to others reflects that
and you'd be selling yourself short, being insecure,
not confident, not believing in yourself.
And when you feel those things about yourself,
other people feel that and they won't believe in you,
they won't feel confident in you, they won't see your worth,
and you'll let people step all over you.
So the first step to healing yourself, love, and self worth is awareness:
awareness of where you are right now, with how you feel about yourself,
your conversation with yourself in your mind,
and especially awareness of your triggers, the things that make you tick,
the things that make you frustrated or angry or sad.
For example: On the topic of my self worth journey,
recently I had a girlfriend, one of my girlfriends from college,
invite me to be one of her bridesmaids this year for her wedding.
And she was so sweet.
She made this package and wrote a really, really sweet card,
and it just moved me so much.
And I was crying and it felt like a little bit of a release.
It was a deep – I don’t know – I just felt so deeply moved by it.
And I was like, “Why? Why do I feel so moved by this?"
Of course it's something beautiful and happy
and it's something that a lot of people do cry over.
But I was ugly crying, like sobbing.
And I was like, “Oh my goodness, why?”
And I realized it's because growing up, I always felt that I was alone.
I felt like I was alienated.
I felt like no one wanted to be friends with me.
I just was invisible.
I just kind of blended in.
And I talked about that, just feeling unloved and unworthy,
unworthy of being people's friends.
And I always kind of felt in the back of my mind,
going through school, elementary through high school, through college even,
that people didn't really want to be my friend,
because people didn't want to talk to me.
And that was just something that I told myself,
a story that was not true.
But it was something I believed in myself,
that I did not even realize I was believing.
It was just my insecurity getting the best of me.
And now I realize, obviously it's because I wasn't making an effort.
I was expecting people to make an effort with me
and notice me and talk to me,
when to be a friend, you have to make effort.
It goes both ways.
And with that negative story that I was telling myself back then, my insecurities,
I recognize now that that is a negative cycle.
I'm putting out negative energy that
“I'm not worthy, don't talk to me, nobody wants to talk to me or be my friend”.
And so people kind of feel that inherently.
It's that negative cycle that just doesn't help you at all.
So that is the reason why I was so deeply moved
by when my friend invited me to be her bridesmaid.
I mean she's one of my best friends,
but it just made me feel so accepted and it made me feel loved.
And it reminded me that all the thoughts and stories I told myself before were untrue.
They were just illusions in my mind and I just wish I saw it sooner.
I don't want to cry cause my makeup is good today.
All right, we're all friends here.
It's okay.
Anyway, as you can see,
I am very, very passionate about this topic of self love,
self worth, and healing your old wounds.
I have so much more to say about this process.
And I'm going to make like a more clear cut,
step-by-step detailed video that will probably be longer,
about how to heal from your past wounds,
how to heal from any traumas.
I will do my very best to keep in mind I'm 29.
I've learned a lot in my journey,
but I'm sure there's so much more to learn.
But I will just share what I can, what has helped my life so far.
And I'm going to be coming out with a few videos around healing.
So the next one will be the step-by-step healing workshop.
And then I want to talk about like healing and astrology,
because there's a really interesting angle from astrology,
which you guys know I'm super passionate about.
Sending you so much love.
You deserve to heal.
You deserve to see how wonderful and lovable you are.
I just really, really hope that we all get on this level where we fully love ourselves,
we fully love our lives, and we are just glowing,
living our best lives, because that is the dream.
That is my dream for all of you out there.
Love you and see you next time.
Bye!