Believe it or not, it can be harder to like ourselves than to love ourselves.

Think about fighting with a parent or a sibling. We love those people with all of our hearts but in those instances, we have trouble liking them when we disagree. We don't hate them, of course, but we sometimes forget how much we love them during such times.

This same logic works when it comes to ourselves.

Most of us inherently love ourselves. We bathe, feed ourselves, exercise, try to maintain a healthy lifestyle, surround ourselves with people we love, take pride in our work or our hobbies, and ultimately want to live our best lives. In other words, we appreciate who we are and want the best for ourselves. Such love isn't egotism; it's self-respect.

The harder part comes to liking ourselves. We get ghosted, isolated, cut off, cheated, lied to, rejected, harmed, and devalued. I am typically a second choice and the one who ends up caught in the outskirts of a conversation. I am a third wheel, a fourth wheel, a fifth wheel. If I am taking pictures with friends and I am in 45 out of 50 pictures with them, they will post the other 5. Times like these make me question my own worth. Why was I put in this world if nobody seems to want me here? It is in these instances that I don't like myself very much.

Sometimes, it has been easy to think that I "hate" myself. If nobody wants me in their conversations, their pictures, their nights out, their lives, I must be a horrible conversationalist, really ugly, not enjoyable to have around, and just a burden to the world. These are toxic feelings, making me question my place in the lives of other people.

However, these feelings have also taught me to make an important distinction. I don't hate myself. If I really did for that matter, I would not desperately want to have friends and pursue happiness, to better myself and surround myself with other people.

I just struggle to like myself.

Too often, people equate not liking ourselves with outright hating ourselves. People think that if I don't like myself, I hate myself--that I am a danger to myself and my own well-being, I am depressed, I am miserable each and every day, and I am eternally unhappy. However, I have learned that I do love myself in my deep-rooted desire to want my own best life. It has been difficult to come to terms with this feeling and fully recognize this difference, but I am recognizing that this feeling is very real and fully valid.

For a while, I did question whether I was crazy for having these thoughts, only to discover that I am far from alone. I have confided in several people who confirmed these thoughts and confessed that they too feel this way. Our feelings manifest themselves in different ways, we deal with these emotions in different manners, but they still exist. None of us are perfect people with perfect lives, so it is so easy to dwell on all of the times when we feel alone and question our intrinsic worth. We know we deeply love ourselves. But times like this seem to come all too often and make it increasingly difficult to like ourselves.

While there is no magical solution to liking ourselves (though I wish there was), I have found tremendous solace in the fact that many other people feel this way too. We all have the self-love--we just need to discover this self-like.

The self-like arises when we understand that people will always try to bring us down, that we all have aspects of ourselves we want to change, that there are so many other qualities we should embrace. Once these feelings become innate to us, we will experience our own self-like.