Love, the most important thing in the world. Some might argue with me, but I don’t care. I’ve made up my mind. Love takes many shapes and forms. It is found in a look. It’s found in words. It’s found in writing, lyrics, movies, and all aspects of life. Anywhere you look you can find love. For some, it is hard to love. Especially when you can not find love for yourself.
I have realized that I am really not different from countless numbers of people in the world. The struggle for me is love for oneself. Experiences are numerous and making the right decision at the moment is difficult and challenging. This is especially true when faced with a difficult situation. Was the correct decision made? Were the right words said? Did my honest feelings come across as sincere? Was the truth told? Many times the answer is no and what follows is sorrow and regret. When life is filled with regret, loving oneself is difficult.
The capacity to love others greatly depends on one thing. That one thing is do we love ourselves? The truth is, how can we love others if we do not love ourselves? Is it possible to love others when we cannot love ourselves? In my opinion, no. Lacking the capacity to love oneself ends up reflecting on others in our life. Of course, I am only able to speak from my own experience, but since I don’t think I am much different than most people in the world I can surmise that my experience happens to be a shared experience.
Losing the ability to love yourself is more than likely a complex story filled with countless events. Loss, regret, pain, suffering, trauma and the list goes on. How we take responsibility and deal with this is our responsibility. It is also our responsibility to learn how to love ourselves. This is not easy and takes work. Self reflection is some of the hardest work out there, but it is necessary and could potentially be critical if you find yourself in the midst of hatred for yourself. How you learn to love yourself is up to you. I believe that it is a different process for each of us and is our personnel responsibility. Just like taking responsibility moving forward after being harmed.
Back to the beginning. It is not possible to love others when we do not love ourselves. If this has never happened to you, imagine that you previously suffered in an abusive relationship. Now you have a new partner, but you haven’t taken responsibility to deal with the pain from the past relationship. It is likely you will anxiously look for the slightest offense in order to take a defensive position. The greatest offense is a good defense. Or, maybe, you were the one who didn’t consider your partner's emotions in a previous relationship and it ended badly. Now you feel guilty, but haven’t put in the work to learn from your past. In your new relationship you give and give and give trying to make up for your guilt, and now find yourself in a one sided relationship. Or, you didn’t think that you were at fault and find yourself making the same mistakes over and over.
To me, the key to loving yourself is discovering what your core values are and then living by those core values. It’s impossible to be at ease when you constantly act against a value you claim to believe in. Dig deep, find your core values, and live by those values. Living your values is honestly the key to inner peace. Once inner peace is found, we can love ourselves and finally begin to love others as we love ourselves.
