"It’s gross as fuck to tell people that no one will love them until they love themselves. Loving yourself is hard. Listen: you are loved, you are worthy of love and respect, and you can be loved even on the days when you see nothing in yourself to love."
I think there's so much truth in this idea. Loving yourself can be incredibly difficult, and everyone deserves to be loved and respected, even if they don't necessarily love themselves. It's important to know that those who truly love us, love us on even on our worst days when we're not too keen on ourselves. I think there is more to be said, though.
What I have learned over the past year or so is that the good old saying, "You can't love until you love yourself" does have a lot of truth in it.
I have a lot of love inside of me bursting to get out, but I never allow it to be used on myself. Self-love is not something I've ever been good at. The thing about it is that it WILL seep into your relationships. I think the ways I have hurt people I love most is by not loving myself. That's a really difficult thing to deal with because it's something I should be able to prevent, and I hope one day I will be able to look deep enough (or maybe the opposite) to do that. I'm a very introspective person, though, and it's hard not to find tons of faults within myself, and right now I haven't learned to stop the introspection and negative thoughts about myself. It's difficult for me to believe that people truly care about me, so yes, in that way it is very hard to love and be loved. If I can't accept love, it's hard to say that I'm truly giving it, and it becomes a vicious cycle when I hate myself more for hurting people with my lack of self-esteem. Love is certainly made more difficult by self-loathing.
Lack of love for yourself also makes it easier for you to be taken advantage of. I put myself in a bad situation because it felt nice to be told I was pretty for a change; that I mattered and was special. I realise now that that situation started when that person became closer to me after a night where I talked about how badly I felt about myself. There are people in this world who will seek out people who don't think highly of themselves, and they will work that from every angle until there's nothing left. Because you don't love yourself, it will feel like you deserve maltreatment and it can disguise itself as love. Perhaps this can happen to anyone, but I think it's more difficult to let yourself be constantly treated like dirt if you don't feel like dirt.
I guess what I'm saying is that life is more complicated than either of those viewpoints and they each have their place. Self-love is incredibly important. I haven't figured out how to do it, but I know that it's important that I learn it. But I also know there there are people who love me through my self-loathing, even when they don't know how. Those people are rare, but they're there. Whether a romantic love can exist through that, I couldn't tell you, but there is love that hopefully one day leads to self-love.
Listening to: Shields by Grizzly Bear
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