A random thought came to mind when I was at work. I was thinking about self-love and how we love others. When we are younger, we are taught first to love others before loving ourselves. And another thought came to mind about how loving others is not the same as how we receive love. Give me a minute; I’ll go in-depth.
First of all, when we start growing up, we are taught to love our parents first or our family; it is what we think is normal and expected, so we assume that we should do it too. But, I realized that our first love is not with ourselves because we don’t know who we are just yet. However, we are not told that we should discover who we are and become our best friends. We assume that our best friend is someone else, someone with whom we can share our secrets and do things we can’t do alone. Why are we not given the tools or the push to go out of our way to find who we are. We are told to follow this path, become successful, be social, create those connections, and have a common and ordinary life. But what if we decide to change that? People may weirdly look at us. People may think we are selfish for wanting to love ourselves first and prioritize our overall wellbeing. People may think you are different for not following that path everybody is taking. But I believe that the moment we decide to put ourselves first and love ourselves for who we are and not the mask put out to the world, we begin to change. Maybe not even change, but become who we are meant to be, the authentic and unique selves that make us different and stand out. But on the other hand, it is hard to shift that mindset, reprogram the way you think and decide to take the first step of becoming your first love.
But now that I am talking about love, I’ll go on to the other thought I had, which was that the way we love others is not the same as feeling the love we receive. I think it is because when we are growing up, we get so used to loving the people closest to us in a certain way that we sometimes forget what it is to receive love - because opening up to love is hard. It is not only discovering what love means to you but also finding out what type of love you want in return. It is accepting your vulnerability but also accepting that you may get hurt. However, you must know that not everybody loves in the same way. Not everybody was taught how to love in the way you were taught. But I think that is the beauty of it.
I am explaining both of these ideas in one article because when we discover how to love ourselves, we are both giving and receiving love. We are finding ways to express love to ourselves, but we are also opening up to the acceptance of the love that we want to receive. Don’t get me wrong; it’s hard discovering this reciprocity of such a powerful emotion. Still, it is important to question and discover it because it may be misleading and misunderstood. You may end up loving in the way that you were loved that was maybe not that healthy, or perhaps it was, but it can also be the definition of somebody else and not your own.
So, as per usual, I invite you to open up and question what love means to you. I invite you to embrace that journey of discovering who you are and falling in love with yourself in the way that you may want others to love you as well. Because I heard on RuPaul’s Drag Race once: If you don’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?
Z.
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