The most important aspect of life is self-love. No one will ever love you the way you love yourself. This is a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. I grew up with low self-esteem for various reasons. I did not feel I had the love of my mother. I was always different from everyone else. I was always different physically, mentally and socially. As a darker complexioned African-American woman who is short and declared obese, self-love is a journey that personally took me a while to learn.
I did learn self-love. It is unfortunate that it took me so long to do so, but it is something that I promote. I try as much as possible to be an example. The older I become, I realize how much of my one of my nieces has a lot of my personality. I always try to reinforce her notion of self-love in a way I wish someone did for me. However, it is best that a person has this inclination from early childhood. Let me explain a little about my plight. I suffered a lot of verbal abuse. I was heavily tormented throughout my school years. In fact, it took me to reach a high level of self-love in my thirties. My lack of self-love has impacted a lot of bad choices, such as toxic relationships.
I was in a relationship for a number of years. We knew each other since our high school years. We started dating in college. We married in our late 20s on our seventh anniversary. Our union had numerous problems in the time we were together. His self-love was around the same level as mine, which I understand now was unhealthy. By the time I started to improve my self-worth, I realized that I could not deal with a lot of the things I accepted when I was not mentally healthy enough to be in a relationship. As I learned to love myself, I began to address many of the repressed things that bothered me in my relationship. With age and wisdom, I learned that one you improve yourself, some relationships change. The biggest lesson that I learned from that relationship is that my self-image sets the tone for many of the relationships I will have in the future. If I do not love myself, no one else will love me. I do not feel as though he ever loved me. I have come to the realization that it does not matter, as I love me. Loving myself is the main thing that matters.
My journey to this level of self-love has not been easy. I had a tumultuous childhood. I have learned that despite everything, God does not make any mistakes and I am made as He intended. I am not saying that I am perfect by any means. I am flawed and I have a lot of imperfections. I am not everyone’s cup of tea. I am one of the kindest people you will ever meet. I am told this often. I am honest and I know that my good qualities outweigh my bad qualities. I continue to work on myself daily. I have seen a lot of growth, but I know I have a lot more growing to do.
The pain of my relationship especially made me take a long, hard look at myself. The aftermath of healing from my divorce also became a humbling experience because I am still picking up the pieces. I do thank him. Being in that situation made me think about lots of aspects of my life. He has no idea how much he indirectly taught me about life, love, and relationships. It is for the best that things, as unfortunately as they were, happened the way they did. It forced me to love myself enough to walk away from it.
The point of this post was to talk about how important it is to have a high level of self-love. Self-love is essential for survival and inner peace. Self-love dictates the things a person will endure and how they will navigate life. I look at my niece and so many other people who do not display a high level of self-love. We as people need to build up our children. We need to love ourselves enough to foster healthy relationships. We need to be able to teach our children how to love them. Some of the issues that plague us as people would not be prevalent if more people had a higher level of self-love. I have seen many lives destroyed because of people’s lack of self-love. It almost destroyed me. Please understand that I am in no way promoting narcissism. I am saying we as people need to value ourselves enough to live life to the fullest.
If you are someone who is struggling in this realm, I want you to do something for me. I want you to make a list of all of the things you like about yourself. We all have good qualities. We all have talents. We are all deserving of love. I love people. I believe that people are innately good despite all of the problems we have. Even if you cannot think of your good qualities, there is something who thinks you have good qualities. Think of that. Spread positivity. I love you all. Peace, blessings, and love everyone. ~ Rayne Elise.
Discovery Journey 