Loving yourself is an emotion that many of us take for granted. Naturally, we believe that because it is our self, how can we not love "me"? Well here's the thing, because we assume that love is freely given and freely received, we assume that the love we have for ourselves comes naturally and instinctual. We are wrong. The same way that it takes time for us to love another person, career, thing, idea, etc. is the same time that it takes us to love ourselves. Here is the tricky part; we've known ourselves all of our lives! Literally. So we have the time but we can still not love our self? The thing about loving our self is that we've developed the time that it takes to love someone/something; but in that time, do you know how much we grow? How much we change? How long it takes for us to figure out exactly who we are to even begin loving ourselves. Even at the age of thirty, so many people are still trying to figure out who they are and what they like. And yet, we expect our friends, mates, and family to know who we are. We are still learning how to love ourselves; and yet, we expect someone else to know how to love us.
Learning to love yourself, really and truly love yourself, and I mean all of you, involves time, understanding and acceptance. Understand that you are not anyone else, so don't try to be. Love YOU. Love your flawed skin, flawed body, flawed hair. Whatever idea you have created about what makes you flawed, has only manifested by the comparison to another person. Think about it like this, if you were the only person, the only man or woman, in a civilization, you would have no one to compare yourself to; so therefore, you would believe that the way you look, your hair, body, skin was exactly how its' meant to be. But unfortunately, we don't live in a one person civilization. We have millions of people to compare ourselves to. And those same people are comparing themselves to someone else. Loving yourself means to accept yourself. Accept EVERYTHING about you. Fall in love with yourself, and I mean, head over heels, floating on cloud IX type of love. The same way you could fall for someone else and experience these same feelings, owe it yourself to feel this way about you first and always. Once you fall in love with yourself and learn how to love yourself, then you can show someone else how to love you correctly. Not knowing how to love yourself or not truly loving yourself, allows you to become vulnerable to disrespect, mistreatment, self doubt, mental abuse, emotional abuse, and so much more. Not knowing how to love yourself makes you submissive to accepting how someone else chooses to love you which may not be the right way you need to be loved. Not loving yourself could make you accept dysfunctional love because of the mere crave to want to be loved.
Learn to love yourself. Try loving yourself. And once you do, watch how many things you begin to no longer accept. Watch the dysfunctional relationships begin to omit from your life. Watch how much more you begin to smile. Watch how much less self doubt makes its' appearance in your life. Love yourself and watch how your entire world begin to change.....
-Krystal M. Ferrell