I was sitting in a study room the other day reading for my English Literature class, poring over the rather dense "Utopia," on hour three of a study session that felt like eternity. I stumbled upon a line that made me physically sit up in my chair and pause for a moment:

“When nature prompts you to be kind to your neighbors, she does not mean that you should be cruel and merciless to yourself.”

I probably reread this quote at least five times, sent it to my best friend and read it out loud to those in the study room with me. And although most of them did not really see the relevance of this quote from the early 1500s, I saw that there existed a truthfulness that echoes heartily to us today. We live in a world that glorifies selflessness to an almost harmful degree; a world that decrees that unless you are suffering under the weight of your own self-deprivation, struggling to shoulder the burdens of everyone around you while ignoring the ones that are eating at your own self, then you are not doing it right. You are somehow "less than" for the mere act of putting yourself first sometimes.

I am an avid defender of kindness to all, of placing people closer to the front of the line than one’s own self. It is rewarding, in its own way, to be known as selfless. But it is also inherently dangerous if that is the quality we admire, if we tell people that you can only be worth something if you take care of others only and yourself never. But Thomas More’s words are not telling us to do that. This is not an all-or-nothing game where you have to choose which side to fall on: selfless or selfish. That’s not the way the world works.

It’s important, sometimes, to just sit down and breathe. To stay in when all of your friends are going out, to curl underneath a blanket and watch Netflix when you feel like you’re suffocating. Your mental and emotional health is always the most important thing. It’s okay to acknowledge that sometimes, you want time for you. It doesn’t require apologies or explanations or extremely deep reasons. You don’t have to spit out dozens of "just an hour, I promise, I’m sorry" excuses. The only person you owe anything to is yourself.

So, to those of you who are sitting there biting your lip and holding your breath: it’s okay not to be okay. It’s okay not to be everything everyone needs all the time, to not be able to be their “person” at every hour of every day. It’s okay to want to be alone, to need to be alone, and just think about you.

Amid hipster pictures and celebrity photographs, Tumblr produced a quote that also made me stop and stare for a moment: “That’s the problem with putting others first; you’ve taught them you come second.”

You matter, too.