I use to be friends with a young woman not long ago. She was 21. Half my age. And I started to think her age really made our friendship incompatible. None the less she wanted to hang out and be around me so I welcomed the company.
She struggled with some personal self esteem issues and I told her she needed to stop and decide to love her self. She struggled with body dismorphia in my opinion. Constantly criticizing things about herself when honestly she was very pretty and had great potential for many things of she wanted to.
Then she had a tragedy in her family due to covid and stopped wanting to associate with me.
I struggled to relate to her in a lot of ways I think cause she was just into very different life style. I guess that is where we divided. But that's ok. I am a bit of a stick in the mud. She said I was I to clean fun. What ever that means. I think its cause she enjoyed drinking and smoking and being g on energy drinks.
I was really trying to push her to treat herself better but truth be told you can make anyone do anything. So I let it go when she basically said she didn't want anything to do with me.
The point is after looking at her and thinking about my many wasted years of disliking myself, I thought to myself, what if when I was her age I actually loved myself and took better care of myself better instead of being so mean to me and giving away all my value to other people.
She use to say she wanted to be helpful and that made her feel valuable to be able to be doing all these things for people.
What if you could feel value for yourself just cause you could. Leave all the self hate behind. All the guilt and depression behind.
One of my biggest struggles use to be feeling like I was a selfish horrible person if I didn't do what others wanted or help other people with everything. I no longer have that guilt. Especially since I realized the folks I felt guilty about never did anything to help me or they did things to undermine me and keep me from moving forward. Crabs in a barrel. "I'm miserable so you have to be miserable too" mentality.
Love i feel is a personal decision. You must decide you care about a person enough to give your all. Some people do it much faster than others when it comes to relationships. Then when the other person disappoints them they hang all their self worth on the love they had for the other person and they get crushed under it.
My feeling were hurt when my friend decided she didn't value our friendship but thats ok. I value me. I don't need her friendship to be happy nor do I need any other relationship.
Had I known and practiced this before my moms passing I probably would not have felt so lost when she was no longer around. I didn't know who I was when I wasnt being her daughter.
Self love is not selfish. Its survival. Giving away all the love you should be giving to yourself is self destruction. What happens when you realize the other person wasn't as into you as you were into them.
Its not saying you are not kind and loving to other people. But that you love yourself and hold other people to the standard of love you deserve. No one can truly treat you better than you can treat yourself.
Wish I understood that at 21. There are a lot of things I would have never involved myself in. But its never to late.
Save yourself, love yourself, invest in yourself. If you do that others can benefit from your positive presence in their life.