In a new opinion piece for The Independent, Harry Potter actress Evanna Lynch discusses the huge amount of hate and cyber-bullying she was subjected to after getting the role of Luna Lovegood.   She also discusses how she joined twitter and all the wonderful comments she got through it, making her ignore the haters even more.  She ends the piece by talking about how you can “love yourself” and be a happier you!  Read the full piece here.

They say we remember a compliment for two weeks and an insult for 14 years. Just as I am about to single out the one troll and prepare to fight venom with venom and fire, I pause and think what kind of person that makes me. Someone who doesn’t care about the dozens of pure, generous souls who offer kindness and support, and instead lavishes time and attention on the one miserable leech? I stop, delete the offending tweet, maybe block the user and focus my attention on the people who remind me to see the beauty in the world and in myself.

I don’t think we’re ever strong enough to read the hateful stuff and let it roll off our backs. It’s all very well for the self-help books and bespectacled psychiatrists to dole out the very grand advice to simply “love ourselves”. What the hell does that mean to the 13-year-old who’s put on 15lbs and is told every day at school she’s a fat pig?

Essentially, “loving oneself” is the answer, yes, but as a hyper-aware, introspective, self-help-book-consuming 22-year-old I have already deduced that that is a mission that takes a lifetime of learning, forgetting, crying-in-your-car-that-you’re-a-giant-failure and relearning all over again.

No, it’s not about demanding of ourselves to instantaneously love ourselves. It’s about consciously choosing light over dark. It’s about realising that even if we don’t have the strength to stare these hurtful comments plain in the face and say “you’re wrong”, we have the strength to search for those people who will convince us that the bullies and the nasty things written about us, or others, are wrong.

And it’s about practising that positive outlook every single day, with every person, in everything we do until eventually – eventually – that becomes a habit.