Love Yourself – Part 1

We can all be hypocrites sometimes. A hypocrite is someone who says something, but does something else. (Ex. You say it’s bad to lie, but you still lie.)

But we don’t always know that we are doing it. I think one big thing a lot of us are hypocrites on is our problems. It’s really easy for us tell other people to love themselves, and make an entire list of reasons that they are a good person. But a lot of the time, when it comes to loving ourselves, it’s not so easy.

This is because we see everyone else from the outside. There’s only one person that you truly know every little detail about- and that’s you. You probably don’t share all of the not-so-good details about yourself with everyone. But you probably do share the good ones. Well, most people are like this. So we tend to think that they are better people than us because we don’t know all the not-so-good details about them.

The truth is- nobody is perfect.

There are lots of things that add to our negative thoughts about ourselves. When we think about one thing we don’t like about ourselves, we tend to start thinking of more and more bad things. It’s kind of like when we are mad at our parents for something, we start thinking of everything they do that makes us mad. We do the exact same things to ourselves without realizing it or meaning to.

Sometimes we regret doing something, and so we think we are a bad person. We never forgive ourselves for it, and so we go through life never being happy with ourselves. But again…

Nobody is perfect.

Sometimes there is one little thing we don’t like about our body, so we keep looking at it and telling ourselves how ugly or gross it is. Then we are already attacking ourselves, so we start to find more and more things on our body that we say we don’t like. Even when someone compliments us on something, we brush it off. If someone tells you, “I really like your outfit today!”, we may say thank you, but inside we often just think that it’s really not that great.

We never think we are good enough, and so we are never happy. You end up being very insecure. I believe that it is true that you cannot love someone until you love yourself. I had a period of time where I was very insecure and thought a lot of negative things about myself, and it effected my relationship in a very negative way. Because of my insecurity, I was always reading into everything he did as something against me. But he made me realize what I was doing to myself, and helped me love myself again.

Even if you did something very bad, you have to forgive yourself. It is not easy, and it takes time. If you learn from your mistake (no matter how bad it was), you should be proud of yourself for learning from it. Many people make the same mistakes over and over (even very bad ones), and never learn from it. As long as you acknowledge the mistake, take your consequences, and ultimately learn and grow into a better person, you have no reason to think you are a bad person.

Remember? Nobody is perfect.

It is not bad to acknowledge all of your good qualities. It’s not conceited at all. Conceited would be thinking that you are better than everyone else, or, thinking that you ARE perfect. There is absolutely nothing wrong with knowing all of the good qualities about yourself. You can even love physical things about yourself without being conceited. One thing I did to begin loving myself again was make short lists of things I loved about myself. At first, I thought it was being conceited. But with the help of others, I learned that it is not at all.

Here is my list. I started out with a list of 5 things, then slowly started making my list longer. I encourage you start making lists about things you love about yourself. It’s okay to start small.

1. I love that I like to help people.

2. I love that I am close to my family.

3. I love the color of my eyes.

4. I love that I am independent, and that I am my own person. I don’t try to be anyone else. I am just me.

5. I love my hair and that I’ve never wanted to dye it because I love my natural blonde color.