Self-Love Required

“I think the most important thing in life is self-love, because if you don't have self-love, and respect for everything about your own body, your own soul, your own capsule, then how can you have an authentic relationship with anyone else?” - Shailene Woodley

I have heard and read many people re-emphasising what this quote means and how important it is to love yourself before you are fully able to love and open up to someone else. For so long, I thought this was some made up fact that people would just say to try to make them sound encouraging or a better person, but recently I’ve come to realize it’s truth.

Let me take you back to the beginning of my realization. It all started with this guy whom I had liked for a while. He started dating this other girl and since I was friends with both of them, I was around them often. Long story short, through seeing their relationship, I had realized that even if he had decided he liked me before starting to date his then girlfriend, I am not sure I would have been fully into the relationship because my poor self-love would have held me back.

I realized that I would not have been able to be fully comfortable with him because I had not yet worked out my own trust or self-confidence issues.

Even though I am still working through some of these setbacks, as I know many people are with their own too, I am continually realizing what it means to love yourself. By this I don’t mean if you're self-conscious but in a relationship then it’s a bad relationship because that is not necessarily the case. On the other hand, I do believe that if you begin loving yourself to the fullest and accepting who you are, it will be much easier to open up and share yourself with another person.

I’m not sure why it seems to be so hard for many people to love themselves fully, yet I struggle with the same thing all the time. I think part of the reason may be that we are our biggest bullies at times because we know ourselves the best. We are the only ones that know every single thing about ourselves. From the emotions we face to the actions we make, we know ourselves the best.

This, in turn, can cause us to be hard on ourselves for past mistakes or small things that another person would have just shrugged off, but we decide to hold onto it and continue to bully ourselves.

This is a problem I’ve faced and seen other people go through as well, but I think another very important step to self-love is allowing yourself to make mistakes.

It is inevitable that a person will make a mistake and while some are worse than others, they are experiences to learn from and build our character off of. Being too hard on yourself will only cloud the lesson that could come from the experience and withhold the true positivity that could come from it.

When it comes to relationships, either siblings, parents, friends, or significant others, trust can be a major setback. I know I personally struggle with trust a lot, yet it is a very important aspect of any relationship. This also goes along with self-love because you need to have trust in yourself and your judgement, as well as, trust that you are choosing to trust the right people. By this I mean, you need to be able to trust yourself that you are choosing the right people to confide in. While that is a matter of if those people having to earn your trust, it is also a matter of trusting your judgement in who those people really are.

Self-love in general can be challenging, but we can use each new day as an opportunity to grow and learn from and use it as time to start loving ourselves as who we are to better the relationships with the people around us, as well.