Being the main character in your own life is definitely something a lot of people aspire to. Life is long. And at some point it all gets blurry. There’s yesterday, today, and tomorrow every single day. Chores and bills are endless, and they tend to pile on top of each other, even socialising past a certain age/stage gets exhausting.

Romanticising your life is taking it easy, slow, and gentle. We are not dying anytime soon. Where are we rushing to? Let’s have long coffee dates, and conversations that dig deep, and let’s have a softer life.

These tips are more of tasks, because if you know me, you know I will give you tips that actually work if you do the work!

1. Judge less. If you judge other people, your inner voice is trained to judge you. Morality, religion, or whatever gives you the right to judge other people, is infused with your bias and will turn against you. Ironically none of these pillars require you to pass judgement. Even under the law, only the executive, legislative and judiciary arms of government can be in charge of sending someone to jail. Not you. So rest and live easy.
2. Be kind to yourself. Being less judgemental about everything eventually leads to you being kind to yourself. This increases your self-confidence. You move with a silent voice of bliss in your head. Your voice becomes the actual voiceover you hear in nice movies. You require less and less external validation and you hype yourself. You strut and you know you own that. And this takes practice too. It takes letting the voice in your head pass, without judging that one too.
3. Make everyday a good day. Yes it is Tuesday. But maybe this Tuesday you find a weird shaped rock that makes you laugh. Maybe this Tuesday your coffee tastes a little bit better. Maybe you make a passing friend that uplifts your day. Or maybe you lacked motivation the entire Tuesday. So make Tuesday, on purpose, a day of rest. The trick is, never attempting to control your day, but accepting each day with what vibes it brings, and rolling with it. It is still an eventful day, full of events you have chosen to accept as what makes up that Tuesday. We always attempt to have a level of control over our days, and our lives, but the truth is life is an energy. Constantly being shaped so that we are shaped. COntrol is an illusion. However acceptance is up to us.
4. Practise confidence. We live in a world that is constantly geared to make you feel like you are not enough. You may not see the cues every day but trust me, they are there for certain! For every nagging your head about how you are not enough, or features on your body you’ll like to change, ask yourself if you are trying to change it because you care, or because you’ve been told to care. Think about the first time someone laughed at your crooked tooth. That is why you want to change it. Not every thought is an original thought. And if it involves changing something on your body that does not add or remove any value to you, or harm anyone, then accept it. Self-love, self-acceptance and kindness are how you practice confidence.
5. Wear what feels good. Read my post on fashion. Fashion is first a form of self-expression, even though it has been reshaped into a statement of wealth. So if you don’t feel good in what you wear, no matter how much it costs, you cannot be the main character of your day. And no one is asking you to wear what others are wearing; or lean into the beige trend or the watercolour or colour wheel trend. What is comfortable to you is only unique to you. Stay there, and tell yourself you look good. If you cannot find the voice, keep trying.
6. Bring art into your life. Music, paintings, flowers, nature. Go out of your way to include these things in your existence. Spend one weekend of the month creating something colourful. Yes, black is a colour too. Play in the sand, swim in the water, learn to have fun, and enjoy mundane moments. You cannot have a slow soft life without art. Find music that makes you feel all the feelings, and create playlists that honour every mood you have. Live every single second fully inside your head. There is a whole world inside you waiting to be explored and expressed.
7. Date yourself first. Whether you like it or not, you are the love of your own life. There is no greater love, no sweeter love than the love you have for yourself. Treat yourself like you’ll treat someone you love. Take yourself to dinner. Go watch a movie. Laugh out loud with yourself. Have conversations out loud with yourself. You cannot self-love without the actual actions. 
8. Give yourself room to breathe. Whatever load you are thinking you have to carry, evaluate it. You do not have to carry the weight of being the best provider, the weight of the life of the party, the weight of having two businesses; the weight of a dual source of income. There are so many lives we are attempting to live that are not ours. We pile so much on our plate and worry about what is not ours to worry about. Carve out free time into your life. Go out of your way to carve out time for yourself, even at the expense of someone else’s expectations of you. If you are not well, you cannot enjoy your life. Establish boundaries and limits.
9. Become a writer. Yep, everybody can be a writer. Our lives are a work of literature. How can there be a romance movie featuring you if you do not write the story. And I don’t mean prose or poetry. I mean journaling. The art of journaling your thoughts and your inner world opens you up to so many feelings and possibilities. It allows you know yourself on an intimate level, and it allows you grow so much as a person. Romanticise you life, by writing it down. And just imagine… you die at a ripe old age, and you leave a story for your coming generation to discover and read. To know about what kind of person their ancestor was, from the viewpoint of the ancestor!
10. Declutter. Yep, this is the last tip, and the one you did not expect to find. I meant to say “beautify your surroundings” at first, but sometimes the most beautiful space is one that does not have a lot of things to bump into. Yes, we are all guilty of this. For me, moving from Nairobi where I had a large 2 bedroom apartment with 3 bathrooms and a pantry, a laundry room, a store, and a kitchen that had a thousand drawers; to the UK, I do not need to expatiate on this. It’s been hard cutting back on how I acquire things, but the difference is, I accept it as a necessary learning curve. I am not aspiring to get a bigger space, like so many people will immediately resort to. Don’t get me wrong i complained for a hot minute. I am aspiring to have less and less stuff that will take space. So even if I get a bigger space, I have learnt to maximise that space. A cluttered space is a cluttered mind. It’s true.

I hope these tips change someone’s life. Not today, not as you read it, but every day as you practice it; as you welcome the idea of change. I pray for the strength for all of us to live lives we are content with. That is the greatest romance story we can ever give ourselves!