Why Self-Love & Respect Is Important, But Not A Superpower

With all these articles around the internet and magazines on how to love and respect yourself, it’s easy to think that these two are the solution to most of our problems. The solution to why you’re never asked on a second date. The solution to why you keep meeting people who hurt you. The solution to your unhappiness. The solution to why you’re still working at a job you loathe.

I waited until I was 20 before I felt ready to go on a date. Future partner in crime had to wait because I made a choice to make my relationship with myself healthy before I was ready to team up with a guy. I also knew that as important it is for me to meet the right person, it is just as important that I become the right person for whoever I’ll meet.

I went on thinking that bad relationships, abuse inside of a relationship whether mental or physical and being played, was a result of having no idea who you are, not knowing your worth and basically having nothing together in life.

I went on thinking that almost everything that went wrong in life was because I had lost my own connection with myself. Although this is definitely not the whole story, it took me meeting two really bad guys and following two tough periods of “what in the world was I thinking?” and two “thank you God for saving me from total misery” to fully realize that lack of self-love isn’t really always the issue.

Even people who love themselves, who know their worth and know what they want in life, make mistakes and meet “the wrong people”. Even people who think they are beautiful, cherish their own personality and mind, end up in situations they didn’t want to end up with to begin with.

Loving yourself doesn’t stop you from making the wrong choices at times. Straight to the point – loving yourself doesn’t make you any less human.

I’d like to say that a good self-esteem and healthy self-love is the best base you can have, and it definitely is, but it’s not a superpower that protects you from everything that is bad.

There are so many factors and so many different reasons to why things happen. Limiting the reason to saying it is lack of self-love and respect is basically limiting yourself from finding solutions and making better choices. Sometimes it’s lack of experience, sometimes it’s actions and decisions clouded by tiredness. Sometimes it’s not even you, have you thought about that?

Let’s acknowledge that these are two of the best tools you’ll have in life, but let us also not view them as some kind of unreachable superpower that makes a perfect life. If you do, you’ll just live your whole life waiting for something that will never arrive instead of living a good life knowing it is and will always be a bit rocky.

Let’s acknowledge that we need them both, but also let us acknowledge that we need to be easier on ourselves when things don’t go our way, that there can be more than one reason as to why things don’t work out the way we want to or plan.

Self-love and self-esteem are two necessities we need to feel good in life, and yes, for making better choices too, but they will never make us any less human.

So next time you’re being hard on yourself thinking all of your problems are based on the lack of these two, just take a second look.

Maybe that’s not the case.

Maybe you’re there already and hey, that’s something to be incredibly proud about. Maybe there’s another issue in your life you need to deal with. Or, maybe it’s about time you rest in knowing that the path of life isn’t straight for anyone and that right now, you’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.

– image credit: Brooke Cagle