Mes­sages of self love, self care, pre­serv­ing one’s peace and pro­tect­ing one’s space rip­pled across so­cial me­dia in 2018 in tsuna­mi-like waves. From skin care to med­i­ta­tion, trav­el, ad­ven­tures in­to na­ture, and every­thing in be­tween, this re­dis­cov­ery of self love and tak­ing care of one­self was the ul­ti­mate kum­baya. As I be­gan to nav­i­gate the whole con­cept of pre­serv­ing one’s space and peace, I re­alised that there is a down­side to a lot of what is be­ing preached.

In many of the on­line based com­mu­ni­ties of which I am a part, we share ad­vice from cook­ing to fi­nances, trav­el, re­la­tion­ships and more. What I have no­ticed is that a lot of the ad­vice be­ing giv­en on the trou­bles of the peo­ple we are con­nect­ed to, of­ten in­volve mem­bers of those com­mu­ni­ties telling per­sons that they need to leave some­one be­hind—end the mar­riage, re­move a par­ent/sib­ling from from their lives, get rid of that friend­ship, get a new job—and do what­ev­er one has to do to avoid or not deal with that per­son or sit­u­a­tion any­more.

I can­not de­ny that I too am guilty of push­ing the “leave them, pro­tect your peace” mantra, be­cause at the time, I be­lieved the per­sons in those sit­u­a­tions need­ed to get rid of all the neg­a­tive peo­ple in their lives. How­ev­er, as I tra­versed my own self love, self care, pre­serve my peace, pro­tect my space jour­ney, I came to the re­al­i­sa­tion that in many cas­es, the per­son with is­sue, the one at fault and the one ex­ud­ing tox­ic traits, was me.

One of my blog­ger men­tors, Lisa Jean Fran­cois, shared a screen­shot of a tweet on her In­sta­gram (IG) sto­ry which read: “Don’t let this taint­ed ‘self love’ trend have you 50 and alone be­cause you walked away from every­thing that ‘didn’t serve you’ in­stead of learn­ing con­flict res­o­lu­tion.” She went on to say that she is all for self care and self love, but some peo­ple use it as an ex­cuse to not face re­al­i­ty. She added that if one knows that one is the is­sue in a sit­u­a­tion, it is good to ac­knowl­edge that and work on do­ing and be­ing bet­ter.

Those IG sto­ries left me reel­ing. Did I ever stop to think that I could be the prob­lem in a sit­u­a­tion? Have I re­moved peo­ple from my life or hid­den from them be­cause I thought they were be­ing tox­ic to me, when in truth, I was the tox­ic one? And in the sit­u­a­tions where I re­alised that I am the one with the is­sue, have I done any­thing to work on bet­ter­ing my­self?

Some of those ques­tions were easy to an­swer while oth­ers were not. In re­flect­ing, I came to con­clu­sion that it is eas­i­er for us to see the faults of oth­ers, to blame oth­ers, to let go of them and to com­plete­ly re­move them from our lives, in­stead of do­ing to the dirty work and look­ing at our own short­com­ings.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many sit­u­a­tions where the oth­er per­sons tru­ly no longer de­serve to be part of your life be­cause of things they have said and done. How­ev­er, there are times when we are the guilty par­ty, we are the tox­ic ones but we won’t ad­mit it.

I have learned that as hu­man be­ings, we do not like to be wrong, we do not like to ad­mit fault and we de­spise high­light­ing our short­com­ings. Of­ten, con­fronting the re­al crux of a prob­lem means bring­ing the not so good things about us to light and no one wants to face their own mess. No one wants to re­lease the prover­bial skele­tons from the clos­et. In­stead, we guard that clos­et for dear life while we de­flect the blame on to oth­ers.

Not want­i­ng to sort out our own is­sues, we end up re­mov­ing peo­ple from our lives, not be­cause they did some­thing de­serv­ing of be­ing ex­iled, but be­cause we don’t want to ac­knowl­edge and deal with our own mess. It re­minds me of a time when the friend­ship I had with some­one be­came strained be­cause I felt they were be­ing neg­a­tive to­wards me. How­ev­er, as I looked back, I un­der­stood that I was the one at fault, be­cause I re­fused to ac­knowl­edge that the sit­u­a­tion I was in (at the time) was not good for me. I recog­nised that she was mere­ly look­ing out for me be­cause she cared about me and, with time, I was able re­pair our friend­ship and even­tu­al­ly deal with my own mess.

My wish for this self love, self care mantra of pro­tect­ing your space, and pre­serv­ing your peace move­ment, is that those who preach it al­so in­clude ad­vice on learn­ing how to face your demons. I wish they teach that self love isn’t pret­ty, it isn’t the beau­ty masks and the pedi­cures that we see on In­sta­gram. It is deal­ing with the good and not so good things about our­selves—un­pack­ing them, find­ing the root cause of them—and work­ing to­wards a so­lu­tion where we can learn, grow, and do bet­ter for our­selves.

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Tshenelle Bethel-Pe­ters aka Nel­ly B, is a nat­ur­al hair, plus size, beau­ty, and lifestyle blog­ger; an avid sup­port­er of buy­ing lo­cal