Love: We all want it. We see it in the movies and on TV. We read about it. We hear about it in songs. And we all want it: to feel wanted, needed, appreciated, important, and safe.

Through my teenage and college years, I was one of the many girls who was under the false impression that I needed a boyfriend to be happy. It sounds utterly ridiculous now, but to me, having a boyfriend was the key to my happiness; I would be complete, and all of my problems would be solved.

I, like many girls, foolishly thought that if I could get someone else to love me, then maybe I could love myself. You cannot expect anyone to love you if you don’t love yourself. And I think the hardest person to love is yourself. It is much easier to love other people.

I, like many girls, have struggled throughout my life with things like anxiety, depression, sexual assault, low self-esteem, self-hatred, etc. Things that happen to us can affect our self-love.

I know for me, how other people viewed me was really important to me. I often looked to boys and people other than myself for my self-worth. When things would not go my way I would go out of my way to tell myself and convince myself that I was worthless and deserved the bad things that happened to me, such as sexual assault.

My sophomore year of college I went on a spring break service trip to Deer Lodge, Tennessee. This service trip was a turning point for me and was actually the first time I fell in love with myself. On my service trip, the members of my service group all wrote affirmation letters to each other. When reading my affirmation letters, I was blown away by the kind things my peers said about me and I actually started believing them and loving myself. I started to view myself the way my friends and family viewed me.

That being said, self-love has to come from YOURSELF. It’s nice to be affirmed by other people but true self-love has to come from you and not what other people think of you. You have to truly believe it and believe that you are worthy of self-love. You have to be kind and gentle to yourself and make time for yourself.

Loving myself did not happen overnight. In fact, it is a process that you have to work at all the time. Fall in love with yourself first to find true happiness and let the rest fall into place.