Learning to Love Yourself First

How many times have you heard the words, "you can’t expect to fall in love with someone, until you learn to love yourself?"

It is the most cliche and frustrating (but true) statement about love. 

Life has been about milestones as far as you can remember and that has guided you to this place you find yourself in today. When you’re a baby you learn to crawl, when you’re one you learn to walk, then when you’re two or three you learn to go “potty” on your own, when you’re five you start kindergarten, and so on. These milestones are created to keep us on a certain track— but lets fast forward. 

You graduate from college with an above average GPA and are thrown into a world where you are can no longer see the next milestone in your path. Good paying jobs are scarce and not easily attainable and you begin to feel incompetent because you have not utilized your degree and you feel as if you are falling behind the rest of the world.

You want to love yourself, but you want to be successful first. You feel as if loving this version of yourself would be settling. 

Loving yourself means making your parents proud. You want to assure them that you are going to be okay on your own. You want them to know that everything they sacrificed for you helped to get you where you are today. (After all, they did they everything could.)

Learning to love yourself is something that is developed over time. It has to be learned. You will most likely hit some sort of “rock bottom” before you are able to build yourself back up— and this time, from scratch. 

You reconstruct your walls and reform your reputations, you move to a new city and meet new people. 

You try to love and love again and find yourself back in that same empty place. 

Loving yourself is difficult when you feel that the world is spinning out of control and you still haven't found your seat on this crazy ride. 

And you aren’t only fighting with the world— you are also fighting with yourself. You're fighting with your mirror, you’re fighting with your mind, and you’re fighting with your fears. 

You wonder if it’s possible for someone to love your insecurities out of you, although, you know that’s unrealistic. Someone can tell you a million times how smart, funny, beautiful or talented you are, but it won't matter until you see those things in yourself.

Loving yourself won't happen overnight, but in many small, baby steps. You will reach a point where you don’t care (quite as much) what people may think of you. You will slowly begin to not only accept your flaws, but embrace them. You will begin to see the beauty in others where you never saw it before. 

That next milestone you have been searching for, will become more visible in time. Be patient. You’re on the right track. Learn to love yourself on this wild journey we call “life,” because the sooner you do, you’ll find that you have someone by your side to take the rest of life's milestones with. That way, the next time you get lost, you won't be entirely alone. 

Learn to love yourself so that you can experience the feeling of loving someone else— the feeling of being loved by someone else. From what I hear, it’s pretty earth-shattering. 

Photo: Skye Lingenfelter (www.skyelingenfelter.wixsite.com/fallingskye)

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