I believe that in order for anyone to truly love you, you first have to love yourself. Now I'm not saying that I was the self-loathing type, and I pray that I never am. I had my insecurities, but don't we all? But what I recently have realized is that not once in my life, as far as I can remember have I ever been able to look in the mirror, or think at a random moment in the day, that I truly 100% love the person that I am. I am the type of person that will with out a doubt do anything for anyone, but I'll also put my guard up the second you try to do something for me. I trust easily but lose it even easier. I want all of anyone's attention and yet once I get it I sometimes don't want it. I'm an extremely touchy person, but I will more than likely flip if you touch me and i'm not in the mood for it. I love to be happy, but i'll overthink myself into the deepest of sadness's. I am a walking paradox and I learned to love that. I'm also the type of person who from what I've learned, is the type of person that when I fall, I fall hard, and I fall deep. These are the things things that I once didn't understand about myself , and so how in the world was someone else going to understand them. The answer is, that they're not. And that's not their fault and honestly, you have no reason to be upset or angry with them.

For someone to appreciate your worth, you first have to appreciate your own. You have to have your standards and morals in line before getting to them, those aren't things that should be decided on while they're already in motion. The things that you are willing to fight for, and the things that you'll back down from need to be clear cut and engraved in to your own memory. You have to ask yourself if someone came to me with this situation, what would my answer be? For me personally I found that I recently dropped and sometimes abandoned majority of my standards recently; and my goal in life is to never ever let myself do that again. I let myself work my way into the obsession over the idea of being in a relationship. I realized recently that I honestly was more in love with what the relationship had been, than with what it had come to. I was in a situation where I was not missed by the one person that I would physically ache over because I missed them just that much. But recently I realized that I wasn't just missing them as a person, I missed the person that they had once been. I'm not shaming them and I truly still do love them, as a person, but they are not the type of person that I want to allow back into my life again - in that way. It took me a while to realize this, and now that I have I honestly feel as if a huge weight has been lifted off of me. They say that holding on sometimes does way more damage than good, and I firmly believe that...now.

For the whole of my freshman year, I was in a serious relationship, and I don't regret this and I wouldn't do it any differently either. I'm honestly thankful for it because after It ended it forced me to find myself again. As far as I had known, my entire freshman year I didn't think solely of myself, I thought about us. I didn't see myslef as an individual anymore, and I lost myself within the relationship. With out the end of this I don't believe that I would have actually realized the things that I want from life, from future relationships, and from myself.

Overall I am thankful for the fact that at one point in time I felt as if I didn't know myself, or my worth - without this I never would have had to readdress myself and decide who I am and how I want to present myself. I've learned things about myself that I wouldn't have realized before, and I have fallen in love with myself and all the small quirks and bad habits that I know one day the right person will come along and appreciate and love all the same.