I have about 5 versions of this topic drafted up, and this may turn into another one. But, here we go, the topic of self love. I preach about it all the time in my blog and honestly its been my hero. I wouldn’t have had the things I had now if it weren’t for me focusing on myself and seeing my fullest potential.
However, we all know the phrase “you have to love yourself” can feel very redundant. And after going through personal experiences of my own to hearing my friends rant about the hardships of love, I had to write about what self love really does for us in the end.
Self Love Empowers Us
Going through my breaks up, there’s nothing like having your own back. Even after the last situation, I blocked my ex, and it felt so damn good having dignity to take the power of what many men unfortunately do to women: avoid conflict and turn off their emotions. And I don’t want to turn this into a bash man blog let alone site. It’s just gotten to a point where ALL my friends even a few male ones have admitted that the standards for men these days are low. So what more is there to do other than preparing yourself for the worst especially in love.
And although situations vary, self love (atleast the healthy kind) to me comes from a place of you putting yourself first AND trying to reinvent yourself for the better. Honestly I wouldn’t have what I had now if it wasn’t for me focusing on myself and taking all the bad in my life and using it to create new chapters. After all, you build character and resistance after going through misery.
Sometimes even a great group of friends can’t cheer you up after a crappy day. Sometimes it’s only up to you to prep yourself up on how good you actually are. And that’s where the notion “why you have to love yourself” steps in because you have to realize what you deserve and what you are worthy of.
But Then It Makes Us Feel Shitty
I think my biggest issue with self love is that it becomes the main excuse as to why something isn’t going our way. If you have personal issues in your life, especially social ones “you need to love yourself more” becomes an echo. And honestly in most cases this is true. There’s nothing more annoying than being around a miserable person who projects their insecurities because they are unhappy.
On the other hand, the “loving yourself” mantra feels as if the person on the other end receiving this advice is to blame. In reality, many times a person’s external circumstances are the reason as to why someone makes certain life choices, not necessarily their relationship with their own self. And even so, this piece of advice can reinforce this toxic positivity that by loving yourself, everything falls into place and honestly, that is not the case. We don’t need to reach our most perfect for in order to receive life’s basics or to attract our biggest desires. Additionally, we all know people who get miracles despite being in an imperfect mental health state.
Things do get 1000% times better when you feel confident and when your mental health is lined up. But there are millions of people everyday amongst a few others around doing amazingly career wise, socially, and mentally. I can argue, that a stroke of self love has brung them the success and fortunes they have now. However, how much self love do you need in order to attract what you truly want?
For instance many of my friends around me, including myself, crave a romantic healthy relationship. The dating game gets old and tiring very fast (can’t emphasize this enough). But admitting this would either make us look desperate, so because of that we get told, “you need to love yourself more” mantra. One that doesn’t fit the puzzle too well.
And when they say, “work on yourself”, my rebuttal is that desires, especially romantic, just comes down to us being human and just wanting connection. We all want to live that teenage dream. But after a series of failed relationships, we already were kinda forced to work on ourselves by default in order to ready ourselves for the next disaster. And again, even with this in mind, you can build yourself to be the most successful, baddest person who has everything going on for themselves, yet some one may say that “you don’t love yourself enough” just because you really crave something human or if you don’t have what you want.
So is being self sufficient worth it in the end when you can’t get what you’d like to attract? Is it seen as a trait that intimidates people?
I Write This To Say..
Honestly most of the time when people say that you need to love yourself more, it comes across as annoying. Lots of people’s problems isn’t due to a lack of love they have within their own selves, but more so a lack of luck. I think it’s easier these days to place individualized blame rather than looking at the full picture.
There are people who do the most trying to improve themselves everyday. Then there are people who don’t or who are simply struggling to reach a decent point of trying to. Either way, as sad as it sounds we don’t always get what we truly want by “working on ourselves” no matter how much we actually try to improve to do so. You can get great things, but not everything because life is just…life.
However, I will say we weed out a ton of bullshit and future problems the more we all focus on our self love journeys. And that’s when loving yourself feels like the shit.
