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Self-Compassion: Notes from Tracy McMilan’s TED Talk “The person you really want to marry”

Posted on July 21, 2020August 4, 2020 by Mag Nolia

Key takeaways: Tracy’s words demonstrate that 1) life doesn’t always give us what we ask for directly, rather life gives us challenges that help us grow 2) to be your best self, and love others more fully, you must first love and accept yourself – faults, mistakes, and all.

  • What does it mean to marry yourself? You commit to yourself fully. And you commit to the belief that there’s no job, person, circumstance that will make you more whole – because you already are whole.
  • The places where you have your biggest challenges are where you have the most to give
  • Sometimes marrying yourself means being brutally honest with yourself about what you’ve done
  • Marrying yourself means loving yourself right where you are…it doesn’t mean “when you lost 10 pounds then I’ll love you”…”if you hadn’t done X, I’d love you” – no, it means loving yourself exactly where you are.
  • You are going to marry yourself for better or for worse…most of us are willing to marry ourselves for better – I’m talking about marrying yourself for worse, your big failures and disappointments and perceived flaws. 
  • You marry yourself in sickness and in health – you forgive yourself for your mistakes. A mistake isn’t actually a failure unless you don’t learn from it and unless you don’t grow.
  • There’s a saying, “you ask for patience, and you get a line at the bank” – what that means, is life doesn’t give you what you ask for, it gives you the people, places, and situation that allow you to develop what you ask for…the thing is, if you don’t get it right the first time, life will give it to you again; life is very generous in that way.
  • I learned how to sit by my own bedside, nurse myself, and comfort myself – and I learned that I am a person I can count on.
  • When you marry yourself – it’s to have and to hold yourself; you love yourself that way you want someone else to love you.
  • I always went through life feeling a sense of lack…I went into relationships to solve this feeling that I wasn’t whole unless someone loved me. Truth was, I would never feel whole until I truly loved myself.
  • When you marry yourself this huge thing happens – you become able to love in this whole new way, you become able to love people right where they are, for who they are, the way you are already loving yourself.
  • When I married myself and realized I already had everything I needed I started to see my job as lighting up my little corner of the world – because I don’t need anything, I already have it.
  • People ask me about my love life…but I’m still working on it, we all are.
  • The way I see it, I took myself to the top of a mountain or maybe the bottom of the ocean, and I got down on one knee, and I said “I’ll never leave you” and now I’m married to the one person I really wanted to be with all along: myself.

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