You Had Forgotten: Love Yourself

Love yourself, something so simple to understand and we constantly doing it, or at least we think we still do it even if not frequent. For those who enjoy their own life, constantly buying tasty and good food to treat themselves, involve in activity that they love, and make sure they laugh and be happy at least once in a day, do experience self blaming, negative emotions, lack of confidence and many terrible feeling in their life. It is completely normal, it's not that talking about loving yourself definitely have no negative feeling in your life, it's just a huge doubt if you truly understand what's the true meaning behind loving yourself, and what you currently doing has anything to do with loving yourself.

Loving yourself is a natural feeling that need no one to teach. Even animals know the actual to love and protect themselves. But how do you explain all those situations where people pick decision that upset themselves, and even regret for a life time? Such event usually involve a huge desperation for something they truly want, but thinking that what they truly want is not for the best, other option is the one that beneficial to all other parties.

This might be surprising, or it's just too common that people no longer see the needs or meaning behind it, many couples practice love in their relationship. Love really exist, it can be seen clearly. But how many of them realize love is not a one way ticket? Giving all love into the relationship is not the key to produce the best and invincible relationship, loving the partner with everything you have doesn't mean you truly know what is love, unable to learn the true meaning behind loving yourself actually bring disaster to many parts of life.

There is one phase that I had learned many many years ago, but I'm ashamed to claim that I learned the true meaning too late. "If you don't know how to love yourself, you won't know how to love others". Like many people, I thought to myself: Why should I love myself? isn't it important to make the other person felt love? Isn't it better to put effort into the relationship so that the other person can see how much I care about the relationship, and how much I am capable of in maintaining a good relationship and love life?

Eventually, I found myself not happy at all. It's true that I felt satisfy to see the relationship growing, nice and steady. It's true that I felt blessed and gifted when the other person appreciate everything I had done for her. But, I am not happy. Because I had forgotten to focus on what I truly enjoy and love in this life.

You see, human is such a complicated creature. I don't consider myself a greedy person who wants everything in my life to be good, we just feel empty when our heart is empty. That's probably lacking of love, in my own terms. Why? Because we contribute the love to the relationship and the other person, then we forgotten to fill our heart with love.

Sadly, not many people understand this. It's just like people contributing all of their effort working to earn money. They measure their success by how much money they had earn, but not how much they had learn and experience throughout the process. Eventually, they felt unhappy despite how much money they had. Because they feel lonely and empty. All those money couldn't buy anything to fill up their emptiness.

It's the same with love. Feeling is not something that can be measured. But when you fill up your love at something else. Eventually you feel that your own heart will be emptied. Despite how successful your relationship is, or how happy the other person is.

Still, there is no specific method to ensure that you are able to love yourself. Life is a long journey, and there is no elixir in it. Balance in this world is a crucial practice. No matter how much you are capable of loving your relationship and bringing it to success and growth, or how much you can make the other person feel loved, do not forgetting to ask for the same from the others, felt loved from others and love yourself the same way you love others.

Do not attempt to go on thinking that loving yourself is nothing important. It's a matter of time before you felt totally empty. It's fortunate if you found out early. Because there are people who realize that later in their life, and there is no way to turn back time. You can only start to learn to love yourself despite knowing there isn't much time left for that, or you probably felt hard to do that because it's really sad to realize and regret that you spent so much time to ignore your true feeling.