How does it feel to say "I love you" inside your mouth?

Honestly, it feels like a lie, a rotten lie. To which the voice within me answers with "Please, stop kidding!" And really, who am I kidding? For whom am I pretending? The world? No! Myself. I am acting daily like a very passionate actor on stage. Lights, camera, action!

I don't know when it started, but I just know it did. Probably the time when others were clicking pictures of me and I couldn't pose, so impatiently, they just hit me with "Oh, come on, give your best face!" "Smile a little more!" "Oh, probably it's your face; let it be." Maybe that's when I stopped looking at myself in the mirror. Maybe that's when I started to flinch when a camera is pointed at me.

Maybe it started when I was just trying to focus on my studies, ignoring all the nonsense in between. Maybe that's why I became an outcast. But then what did I do? I did what everyone does. Next time when I met new people, I smiled a little bit more. I became someone I wasn't, a persona so people would like me, and I'd be one of them. Not realizing that doing so, I was just pushing myself further away from myself.

Or maybe it started way before this. I don't know, and I don't want to know. Because all I know is that I've altered myself accordingly. I've never loved myself enough to be exactly what I am. I've never given myself time to discover the type of person I am. I just loved the parts of me that people like the most. The rest? I just pushed them away, somewhere into oblivion. Forgetting that hiding behind masks only lead to emptiness.

So today, when this prompt came and I said "I love you," the instant reply was "Stop kidding me!" Because all this time, I wasn't loving myself; I was just trying to become something that people would love. In fact, I never loved myself enough to say it out loud, "I love you." And maybe that's why the words still feel foreign on my lips.

But is it really that easy to love yourself when people around you scream at you to be perfect, to fit their idea of perfection? And you're just a kid trying to find your own path amidst all the noise. And to be honest, when we were supposed to learn about ourselves, our thoughts, and our opinions, instead, we were forced to conform to generational thought patterns.
But I'm here now, and late is always better than never. I'll love myself, little by little. I know it's hard to love yourself while also striving to improve, but yes, I'll try. I'll stop pretending to be someone I'm not, stop performing for others, and stop hating the parts of me that don't fit their mold. I'll try to be a better version of myself, not for their approval, but for my own sake. So next time when I say ' I love to to myself i won't flinch, instead i would just smile, because it's finally true...