I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We all have been doing it since the beginning of time. Every single one of us is guilty of reaching our hands into the proverbial cookie jar of love for all the wrong reasons at one point or another in our lives. It's comparable to looking in a dark corner and expecting to find some sort of lightness that will fill a hole inside of us, but realizing after the search that the hole actually got a lot bigger.

There is no denying that it is completely earth shattering when the person that you thought was a constant actually turns out to be a variable. Sometimes this sort of revelation causes us to loose little pieces of ourselves until we are stuck looking at a puzzle that we no longer recognize. And this is when it starts. This is when you begin to look for the thing you lost in all the wrong places, with such a vehement determination that, ironically, you forget what you’re looking for in the first place.

I have watched my friends go through it, I have seen myself go through it and what I have realized is that you cannot look for the pieces of yourself that you lost in other people. Don’t force an end piece into the middle of the puzzle just to say that you found a fit. Because in the end the one person you should be honest with in this world is yourself or else you’ll lose sight of who you are permanently.

The best advice that I can give you is to look for what you lost not in a temporary distraction but in yourself. It is so vitally important to love yourself. Spend time alone, take a bubble bath, light a candle and learn to be alone with just you. Learn what you love, learn what you don’t love. Make your end goal to know yourself so deeply that you no longer need someone to put together your puzzle because you already completed it yourself.

I hope you learn to love yourself. I hope you learn that the only person you cannot lie to is yourself and that it is time to face the metaphorical mirror in front of you, even if it exposes things you tried to bury. The most satisfying thing is finally getting to a place where you are enough for you. Only then will you begin to look for love and find it in the right places.

So I leave you with this: take a little time out of each day to love yourself a little more. If you don’t like who you have become, there is always time to change the picture on the puzzle. Take a drive alone for 30 minutes and listen to a song that no one in the whole world knows but you. Go to the movies alone. The only way to find yourself is to lose yourself, remember that.