Self-love and steel pans

Today, I had my end-of-year steel pan recital at University. I hadn't really left myself enough time to prepare (as we had a lot of written work to hand in that took time away from practice), so despite working on my pieces as hard as I could, I made some fairly obvious mistakes in the first set. This brought my mood down considerably and affected the rest of the performance, so by the time I left, I was pretty upset with myself.

I don't have the best self-esteem ever. A lot of the time I feel unhappy with how I look, how well I perform at Uni (both in playing and also in written work), I worry a lot about how employable I'll be when I finish, how good a girlfriend/daughter/friend/flatmate/bandmate/whatever I am. So I was all set to hate myself for doing badly today, but when I got into the house and went to sit on my bed, I found this:

For context, that's me at the front, aged about three, and my big brother Dan assaulting some small boy in the background, aged about five. I have no idea how my parents managed to get this photo, but it's hilarious. 

My dad digitized loads of our old family snaps recently, and I printed a bunch of them off to put in frames around my flat - this one is probably my favourite. 

But what I found when I looked at it, was that I couldn't hate myself in this context - that girl isn't perfect with her little pot belly and her chubby legs, but I don't think about that. I think about how cute she is with her crazy blonde hair and her little blue swimming costume with bows on it. I wouldn't be angry with her if she made a few mistakes in a performance, I would comfort her. I certainly wouldn't go on about it constantly to make her feel bad. So why should I do it to myself now? Not so much has changed...

Also for your viewing pleasure, this

This (that's compost that I'm eating)(another parental camera moment of hilarity)

 And this

Can't hate them either...