Do you need to love your self so others can love you? My personal answer would be yes and no. Learning to love your self so others can can be a bit confusing at times, this is what I have learned so far. You do need to respect your self and through that others will respect you because they see that you respect yourself. Who knows where that respect can lead? Yet respecting yourself is a part of loving yourself. At the same time people are all different and choose to surround themselves with different people who have different varies of influence. Now I know from my own experiences that I have wanted to feel accepted by the world and tried to project an image that was not really me and did not hold any respect as to who I was. The idea of letting someone else love me is a bit daunting and has often caused me a great amount of fear. A part of this is due to fear of many things; the thing that stands out the most looking back at my experiences is that I did not respect myself. What I mean by this is to be blunt I did not like myself. On top of that I have not experienced nor seen a healthy relationship. Not understanding how to grow a relationship and fear in general made me feel like I would be trapped. Getting to watch a healthy and good relationship grow and flourish has shown me that I would not be trapped but that I had a lot of growing to do on my own. I had not accepted me and there fore did not respect myself. If I did not respect my self to be blunt again, how could I love myself?When I looked up what it meant to love yourself there are a lot of different parts to it. One of the parts is respecting yourself. This is something I have been working on through my journey of going for what I want instead of what I thought I was supposed to do. I am continuing my work on this by putting more effort into my writing and taking up writing poetry again. Yet all of this in only one part of respecting myself, and I must admit that since starting this blog I have felt like I am doing more toward that. I am working on not trying to be a version of normal that other people think I should be but to be the version of normal I am. Yet at the same time when I look at the list of things, I found on google to show respect to your self I know I have been afraid about some of them. This is also fear that has caused me to shy away from relationships and the idea of being loved in the past.
We come back to I am respecting my self or rather working on it what about loving myself. As with respecting my self there are parts that I am decent at yet there are also parts I am working on, and parts that I need to bring attention to. According to some of my research some of the ways that you can love your self are having fun by yourself and starting a journal. These are things that I am good at or enjoy. On the flip side it also listed giving your self a break and forgiving your self for past mistakes. This is something that is harder for me, I have a strong reaction when ever I think I have made a mistake. What I have learned about these mistakes or in some cases perceived mistakes is that often it is amplified by me. I seem to make the mountain out of a mole hill. I am sure I am not the only one who has past mistakes they have found hard to forgive them selves for. This is something I am working on and to be honest through things like self-affirmations, journaling and talking it has gotten better. I do think I have forgiven myself, yet I do still deal with this massive fear of making mistakes. I have also learned ways to calm that fear through self-affirmation. This week that was put to the test and I was enormously proud and happy that it worked and that it only resulted in a few tears rather than the normal amount. In the past this would of taken many tears and conversations and venting on my side. To have that completely cut in half and me coming out feeling okay day of is a big win in my book.
By doing the research, self-reflection and free writing for this post I think I have figured a few things out. You do need to respect yourself and love yourself for someone to love you. You must know who you are. I for so long did not understand this, I as I mentioned earlier had a lot of fear of being trapped. A part of that was because I do not have any experience in romantic relationship and didn’t really have any good examples of healthy relationships around me. Now this is due to many factors one of which was during a time in life I would have been figuring this out in my teen years I lived in another country where things were different. Now though I must admit that has changed, while I am growing and loving my self and trying to bring my self to be my best. I must admit that I do want someone to share lie with. The fear is still there, the dates I have been on have had fear and one did result in running again but that is a different story. As you learn how to love yourself and respect yourself, the step to be honest I am currently struggling the most with is expressing myself. In some ways I think that I am good at this, yet in other ways of expression I am not. I have gotten other ideas from some research that I did that I think I might try as well like starting a gratitude journal or writing a love letter to myself.
Lemons or Lemonade 