Glow, Girl! The biggest self-love lesson I've learned from my terrace.
One of the best things I realized during quarantine is that I had a terrace. And no I haven’t recently moved house. Actually, I’ve been living under the same roof for the entirety of my 25 years.
It’s not as if I never went up there, I used it regularly to dry my laundry, store all the stuff that I didn’t want hanging out in my house anymore, and keep my half a century-old plant of rosemary - something that I and my very Italian family take very seriously it’s our three-generation-old collection of aromatic plants.
But the one thing I didn’t understand was the importance of having an outdoor space without leaving the house. Something that would become very apparent during the first half of the year where a foreign virus forced us all to figure out how to spend the majority of our spring locked inside our houses (possibly without freaking the hell out). And so day by day forced by the anxiety that came with living in the same four corners for months, I slowly but surely started to rediscover the wonders of my own little town terrace, something that I had always taken for granted.
Firstly, it became a tradition to climb the two old staircases and sit underneath the scorching spring sun on my roof for my daily supply of vitamin D. Then I started noticing that my terrace was actually the perfect setting for a tiny but very efficient city garden (see aforementioned rosemary). And then it became a habit to go out food shopping and spend hours looking for seeds, dirt, and vases.
The most important lesson I learned from quarantine is the importance of taking care of myself by realizing that you only have what you have and if you spend your life wishing for something that you don’t have or can’t have you are wasting your time. The only thing we can do to feel happy even in unprecedented times of discomfort is to understand that we have to work to make the most out of what we have instead of wishing for something that we might not have at that specific moment or that we might not have at any moment at all.
And so as I’m writing this column sitting on my terrace admiring the sunset, and surrounded by my tiny vases of wonky aubergines and very very tiny tomatoes my soul is serene and happy. Because my little terrace is there to remind me the most important lesson I learned during these past few months: make the most of what you have, work on it, and start living the life you want to leave right now instead of postponing because you’re wishing of something that you probably won’t ever have. Also a side note: when you start looking at something with eyes full of love the people that surround you will start doing it too. Since the end of lockdown, I have started using my terrace to invite people over and by seeing how much love and passion I hold into this very very special and wonky corner of my house, all of my friends started to love it too - and now I have to find a way to keep it all to myself at least once a week.
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Share your Self-Love journey on Instagram with Margherita @margheritafresilli and on @Muse_and_heroine.
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