Love Yourself, Before You Love Others!

Most of us with out even noticing it, we tend to love others, before we even get the chance to love our own self. Then they wonder why things go wrong, they get to involve trying to make others happy, while at the same time they’re sitting around trying to figure how to make themselves happy. It doesn’t work like, I personally believe that having self-respect is more important. Not being comfortable with yourself, brings unhappiness. self- respect is recognizing that everything worth having has a price, which is followed by happiness.


I live by the quote, “Love yourself first, before you love others”. This quote was introduced to me by a close friend back in High School. I remember feeling left out, I don’t know if I felt sad, or lonely, I just knew that I wasn’t the person I was used to being, I never paid to much attention to myself. I felt like I was being trapped in this black whole, not knowing how to escape from it, just like any typical teenager at that point in their lives feels when they hit that stage in high school. One day, I walked into my English class, we were have way through the semester when a new girl joined our class. The teacher sat her right behind me, I looked back at her, not with a smile, but not with a mean face either. Next thing you know, with a blink of an eye we became close friends, we started talking and hanging out more often. What’s ironic is, that just knowing this chick for so little time, through my smiles, and laughs she was able to tell that there was something wrong. One evening during lunch, she comes and sits next to me and asks me, “What’s wrong?”, I said, “nothing, why?”, My intentions weren’t to show anything, I mean I didn’t even feel like I was portraying some sort of expression, or body language, but I guess their was enough evidence for her to catch on. Then she popped out with the question, “Do you love yourself?”, in the back of my head, I was like, “what the hell is she talking about”. I started thinking, and deep inside I knew I wasn’t happy with the way I was, I felt not comfortable within my own self, and I responded back, “I’ve never thought about myself like that”. I Must have been in denial, she shared some of her past experiences, that were quite touching, and I thought to myself, oh man, she has it way worse than me, and I’m just complaining about how I don’t like certain things about myself. Through her words, I learned how to love myself for who I was, and learned to recognize that everything I was and had was worth being happy for. In the end, I got over my fears, and applied the “self-respect rule”, which in my eyes was, learn to love yourself, before you choose to love anyone else, whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, and in return one will seek happiness.


This close friend, and I continue to be friends, I share this story, because it was life changing. I mean, yes, we were young at heart, but we knew what it was like to feel uncomfortable in our own shoes. Through the many conversations we had, we learned a lot about ourselves and became happy campers. Now and days, I see friends, and just people in general, struggling and feeling down because so and so left them, or did them wrong ect, only if they knew that by having self-respect, it is much easier to overcome all that. Self-respect can be taken away just by a simple face expression, that expresses to the other person that their ugly for example, but people can’t take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them. When you express love, acceptance, and respect, you create happiness within.