"Love yourself first and everything else falls into place." - Lucille Ball
For years, people told me that I needed to learn to love myself before I could ever let anybody else love me. I never knew how true that was until I got out of a long relationship and realized that I lost myself and I didn't love myself, no matter how much I thought I did. One of the most important things that anyone can do, is to fall in love with themselves first before anything else happens.
To the girl struggling to love herself, I know where you are, I have been there, and honestly, sometimes I still am. Remembering to love yourself before you can love anyone else is one of the hardest things that you can do, whether you believe it or not. There is no one thing that you can do to truly love yourself, but once you find the one thing that works for you, nothing can stop you.
Listening to people continually telling you to love yourself first and then you will be happy again is harder to listen to than most people would think. If you're anything like me, you believe that you already love yourself and there's nothing else that you can do to love yourself more. In my case, I didn't realize that I lost myself in my last relationship, so once I realized that, the next thing I needed to learn how to do was find myself again. Once I found myself and who I was, I knew that I could figure out what I could do to really love myself again, and it's definitely a work in progress.
In order to love yourself again, finding yourself is important. Knowing what you want is also extremely important, and once you know those things, taking care of yourself in ways that you've never done before is the next important thing. What works for me may not work for everyone else, and works for my friends didn't work for me.
Something that I know has worked for a lot of people in order for them to remember to love themselves, is to pamper yourself. This may seem pretty self - explanatory, and it is, but the one thing that people may not seem to understand, is how this helps you truly love yourself. For me at least, this was something that was difficult to remember because I like taking care of other people or I would much rather take care of other people any day over myself. The one thing that makes me the happiest is seeing other people happy. When I started to remember that I needed to love myself again, I seemed to forget that I was the most important person in my life, and that I needed to be able to depend on myself and not other people, because I am the only person that is going to be there for me for the rest of my life.
As hard as it may seem, loving yourself again--or at all, is possible and is one of the most important things that can happen in your life, because no one can truly love you until you truly love yourself.
