“If I could do it all again, I would find you sooner so I could love you longer.”

Ah, this quote! The meaning it held for me when it screamed out at me from a page in the book that I opened during a writing activity I attended last week.

The meaning I made when I initially read it and the meaning my instinct pulled were so varied.

During the exercise, we were asked to pick a book at random, open a page, and choose a sentence as a prompt to write on. This is what my eyes picked out from the deluge of sentences on the page that opened up before me.

I looked at the sentence, and my head went straight to the most obvious place – my partner, the love of my life. I thought, Am I here to write about my love for him? Why had I thought that this one-hour would be about me?

We were instructed to begin writing, and as I begrudgingly put pen to paper and allowed the blue ink to flow, something unexpected emerged. What filled those fine lines on the page wasn’t about him at all. It was something I hadn’t consciously considered when I had first read the quote.

A whole different story unfolded. The same sentence, read and processed by the same mind, led me somewhere entirely unexpected.

It spoke to me about how, if only I had learned to recognize who I was — if I had found myself sooner — I could have had that much longer to learn to love myself.

I could have loved myself through the growth, the hardships, the struggles, the successes, the failures, the pain and strife, the loneliness, the joys, the heartaches, the glimmers, the triggers — through everything.

And as I reflected, I realized how that shift would have changed the way I navigated life’s challenges. Self-love, I see now, is an anchor. It steadies me when the waves of life threaten to pull me under. If I had found it sooner, perhaps I would have faced my struggles with less fear, less self-doubt. I might have approached my failures with more grace and seen my successes with more pride.

But here’s the thing: does it have to be “too late?”

Self-love is an ongoing process. It’s not bound by a timeline or a starting point. Whenever you begin, it’s always right on time.

This is what spoke to me, it doesn’t matter now that I didn’t find myself sooner. The quotient of regret is present and that cannot be fixed. But what can be considered is that if I missed out on all those years and opportunities, I could make up for them by not missing out anymore. If I find myself now.

No more permitting doors to close because I couldn’t make my way to them. No more whispers in the wind.

And so, while I can’t rewrite the past, I can embrace the present. I can choose to love myself through all that life brings from this day forward.

Every moment I spend nurturing the relationship with myself, is a moment well-spent. At the end of the day, no one can love me like I can.

And doesn’t self-love come back to that – be your own priority!

Love always,