I have no experience with anxiety. I have always been confident and happy and rarely cared about the opinions of others. Nor has public speaking or going anywhere to be judged by the masses been an issue. Because of this, I have no merit on the subject of anxiety. I also can rarely spell anxiety correctly the first time.
Love, though. I have some experience there. By love I do mean romantic love, keep that in mind. Romantic love isn't talked about in a serious manner enough for how big of a deal it is in human life.
My experiences in romantic love will be discussed in a future post, but for now I'd like to share something I wrote recently that inspired me to change my topic in the first place.
You have to learn to love yourself before you can love someone else. This is an accurate and truthful phrase.
A lot of people discredit it, saying that your ability to love doesn't depend on love of yourself, and this is true. Love is powerful and can push through barriers that seem impenetrable otherwise. However, that is not what the phrase means to say.
It is saying that real, healthy love can only be found when you have love for yourself. What is healthy love?
Wouldn't we all like to know.
Young love is often justified with phrases like "I can't live without them" or "They're my everything". You meet that one person that makes you feel beautiful and worth it and you feel like you're on cloud nine. You're validated and important to someone.
But then it happens. That person, that one person who you depended on for love and validation just leaves for one reason or another. Poof. Gone. And with them went feeling beautiful and loved and worth it. Your world crashes down around you and your self esteem drops.
This is unhealthy love. Putting all of your faith into a person to feel like you're worth it is dangerous to your emotional health and psyche in general. So, how can you stop that from happening?
You. You are the answer. It sounds cheesy and like you've heard it a thousand times before but it is 100% true. If you look at yourself and accept every imperfection, every little thing you think is bad about you and just say screw it. Screw feeling bad about my imperfections and screw thinking that people give a shit about them. As the great Bernard M. Baruch once said, "Be who you are and say how you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter won't mind."
Once you do that, you are invincible. Literally, nothing can touch you. When your validation comes from within, no one person can take that from you. When you love yourself, you will never feel unloved or unwanted. When you can depend on yourself instead of another, you realize the number one thing I've learned in life: Dependency is not love. Love is enjoying a person's presence because you compliment each other's personality. Because they make you laugh. Because you have things in common. Not because they call you pretty or say they love you. They're actions are important, not their words. Pay attention to the difference.
