As we enter the new year, and fresh off of our short hiatus and first year of blogging, Lauren and I have had a lot of time to figure out what we wanted to do more of with the blog. 2020 made it apparent that we all need a little more love in our lives, and I’m so excited to introduce Love Yo Self Saturdays! As we get into 2021, I wanted to get back into our tagline: helping you learn to love your shelves and your selves, one book at a time.
Love Yo Self Saturday’s will (hopefully) be a monthly segment on the second Saturday of each month, where we’ll discuss different forms of love and self-care, and of course, bring in some of our favorite comfort characters and how they care for themselves. Additionally, we hope that y’all will have some input of your own, whether that be questions or topics you’d like to see (which you can submit via email, twitter, or in the comments below)!
My goal was mainly to introduce LYS Saturdays, but also to write about my own relationship with self-love and books. Like most of our ideas, this all started with a text. From our conversations about messy characters who would greatly benefit from therapy and better coping mechanisms, and of course from our own struggles with self care, I found a desire to start writing a mini self-care column (mainly as a joke for said characters). All this to say, how we experience love plays a huge role in who we become. Being someone who learned a lot about myself through books, this felt like a good way to sort through it all, and maybe help some others feel not so alone.
As a little love letter to childhood favorites, I wanted to talk about how much of my growth has come from learning how to diversify empathy; empathizing with others gave me the ability to have empathy for myself, especially watching it happen for some of my favorite characters. If you read our Q&A relaunch, you know that Graceling is one of my favorite rereads of all time. Each time I read, I find an increasing appreciation for Katsa’s character development. The essence of her character remains the same, but she learns to view herself in a different light, which informs how she guides her other relationships. There isn’t just one way to grow with yourself, but with so many role models between the pages of our favorite books, the inspiration is endless.
For future love yourself Saturdays, I hope to hold a space for this degree of vulnerability where I share a little of myself with you. Although this one is short and sweet, I hope you find a piece of me to relate to, and also connect with each other! Who knows? Maybe in the next few months, we’ll all have 400 new friends.
hello this is exceeds so many levels of cute and warm and i cannot wait to heal and hopefully get better at addressing my emotions rather than falling into exisential crisises along with you <3 love you always nana!
ah yes this is exactly what I wanted thank you love š Iām so excited for all of it