Before You Can Love Others, You Have to Love Yourself; Bullshit

Loving myself has always been a back and forth battle between “I really do think I love me” to “I absolutely despise everything about me.” Although it may be a struggle to truly love and enjoy myself as others might, I have no struggle in knowing when I love another person. When I see those quotes that claim “I need to love myself before anyone else,” I just chuckle.

Maybe it’s just a way to motivate people such as myself to try and love themselves, to make them think that if they do, they can love another person to the fullest; to me I just feel like I was being forced and pushed into believing I can’t love, just because I disliked myself. I know I can love. I’ve loved people before even realizing how much I hated certain things about myself. I loved my family before I could even speak—even though I couldn’t say it—maybe that sort of love just comes naturally. I loved my friends at the age of seven, when I didn’t need to worry about how I felt about myself first. I claimed to love my first real boyfriend at the age of 13; claimed to love. I’ve claimed to love many people, in which I’ve learned sometimes it hurt to do so; but I knew what love was.

Love is such a significant and distinct feeling, it’s hard not to feel it. It’s a thing that’s impossible to control, even though we try sometimes; it’s not up to us to decide when it comes and when it goes. It’s something we all desire at one point in life. It’s willing to commit and trust; it’s putting all of yourself into that something or someone because they make you feel some sort of way that’s hard to compare to anything else you may feel. It’s magical but unpredictable. Though we may fear some aspects about it, we can never truly remove love from the list of emotions we feel. Through all it’s complexities, we still love; even if we don’t love ourselves too.

Maybe it happened while growing up. Somewhere along the road I lost track. The constant feeling of trying to impress everyone was tiring; that’s most likely where it started. Everyone feels it at some point, some people get over it. As for the others, we spend our whole time trying to change ourselves until we realize, it was pointless. All those times I’ve looked in the mirror. All the times I saw the things I had grown up to dislike, whether it was me being too skinny, or the pimples on my chin. Whether it was the braces on my teeth or my big eyes that made me look like a fish; my thin, flat hair or the way my nose looked different on one side. All that judgement, I would discover to be pointless. Pointless but, just because I didn’t love myself that whole time doesn’t mean I didn’t hold love in my heart at all. I’ve loved so many people and still do. Could it have been to the fullest of my ability? I will never know. But a quote shouldn’t conclude that Im not able to love at all; that’s the bullshit of it all.