Today we’d like to introduce you to Meredith Marple.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Meredith. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I’m not lucky and I don’t have innate gifts for winning people over. A chubby misfit all throughout school, I learned to play guitar, eat in private, and avoid getting beat up. Far from an outlier, I can be unsure of myself and struggle with confidence issues. I’m a certified makeup artist who runs the beauty department at a busy downtown CVS. What you don’t know is that when I’m at home, I’m a different person to the world. I’m an author who has over 30 thousand followers on Instagram for a self-love page I’ve been behind for several years. We give the advice that we need to take.
I want to reassure you that I’m no different than you. I’m someone who only five years ago started writing long-winded captions on Instagram. I was in the dark for what felt like forever because I was on a tremendously new spiritual journey. Something within me was breaking at the seams to be heard and seen. I took control of my voice by writing into my heart and sharing it to the world. Overtime, I caught onto a common theme throughout my posts; Self-Love. It felt like one day I just woke up and started to do nothing but eat and breathe it. I was writing advice from my personal experiences by sharing my intimate, inner-world lessons for the world to see.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
There are so many things I could say about self-love. Self-love has a personal definition for each of us. My needs don’t fit a mold for how someone else needs to take care of themselves. It’s a hot topic these days. If you use the hashtag #selflove on Instagram, there are over eight million tags posted. Being in the industry, especially with self-love being something very intimate and interesting to me, I’ve noticed it can be a complex journey… yet, we still make it too complicated at times. And I believe it’s because so many people talk about it and it becomes overwhelming to sort through.
I think social media is what perpetuates a lot of the stigmas and assumptions. I think we get caught up in people’s personal results of their self-love transformations, then we compare our own current struggles to their highlight reels. And that’s what can hold people back – comparing themselves with other people’s journeys and results – having assumptions or misinformation. We expect the same results for ourselves and become disappointed when we don’t achieve or accomplish what someone else has. Therefore, we sometimes give up trying before we even get started. Self-love doesn’t end any of the complications we face. Nor does it end the pain we naturally feel as being human. What it does do for us is end the personal suffering caused by our thoughts – the ideas we have about the way things should be versus the way they actually are.
Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
By day I focus on self-love in the beauty industry, at night, I focus on inner beauty. I help people from all over the world connect with themselves and one another over common concerns about the relationships with themselves. I pull advice from what I’ve learned in all my soul years and hope those messages can better someone’s day. The cherry on top is being able to inspire and stimulate someone to reflect on their own truths and learn more. At the end of the day, and for the end of my life, I want to be known for making Love famous again.
Looking back on your childhood, what experiences do you feel played an important role in shaping the person you grew up to be?
My mother. By following her example, I learned about integrity and how to love amidst heartache and hardship. She taught me that the hardest to love are the ones that need it the most. She taught me how and why to forgive but also how to keep my backbone and boundaries. She taught me that there is always a lesson in something but tomatoes are sometimes just tomatoes. Honestly, she has taught me so much that it’d be easier to list what she didn’t get around to teaching me. Like, how to drive a stick shift. Or how to garden. My mom has always been a huge part of me and vice versa. I swear in a different lifetime we must have been best friends or sisters. I wouldn’t be the woman I am today if she wasn’t in my life.
Pricing:
- Free beauty consultations at CVS (ha!)
- Download Meredith’s eBook “Mini Big Lessons” for FREE on www.belongtolove.com
- 50 Ways of Self-Love is on Amazon for $14.99
Contact Info:
- Website: www.belongtolove.com
- Email: meredith@belongtolove.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/belongtolove
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/meredithmarplebelongtolove
Image Credit:
Christine Michelle K
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