“Girl you are amazing just the way you are.” You have probably heard this song before. While it is about a woman…and kinda makes sense if you are hot/beautiful, if you are not…well, you know.
For men, it does not matter. You are going to have to work hard to get some recognition in this life. I digress for a bit. Where were we?
Everybody wants to be loved. From the time we set foot on this earth as babies, we are looking for it from our parents. As we grow up, many of us try to impress them until that stage of chaos hits! Adolescence!
Madness ensues and we need a new master to seek love from. It could be our friends, a man, a woman, a video game, a sport, etc. It is a strange time when we start looking outside our parents for love. It can go very well or wrong.
But the one thing that we rarely consider is loving ourselves. Or finding love within ourselves.
I know you are thinking, “I hope it’s not time for some cliche stuff. Please spare us, Simon.” I hope what I am about to share is not.
Sometime back, I realized plenty of what I did was based on being accepted or loved by others. I felt better if I felt like I was making others feel better. Do you know what I am talking about?
Eventually, that backfired on me in many instances and I decided I would not give a shit about what people think. Now, people had to “love me for who I was.” Lol.
The sad reality about most people that make that decision is where they are coming from. And where are they coming from? Bitterness, anger, disappointment, embarrassment, entitlement, self-righteousness, etc. “I am such a great person. How could they do that to me?”
We have difficulty accepting that our motive for doing what we did was selfish. We did not care about making other people feel better for themselves. We did it for ourselves. Selfishly.
So when it backfires, we get mad and want to be accepted for “who we are.” But who we are was the problem in the first place. The issue was with us all along. We do not love ourselves correctly.
So what needs to happen?
We need to become loveable. What does that mean? Become someone you are proud of. A lot of us do not like who we are. Some of the time, the things we do not like are out of our control but other times, they are.
For the things that are, ignoring them takes us down a road of self-loathing. We cannot ignore what we need to and can change for too long. Eventually, it plays into how we see ourselves.
Are you ignoring the career you should be investing yourself in? Are you ignoring your health? Are you still hanging out with destructive friends? Are you still investing yourself in bad relationships with the other sex, family, etc?
The more you do not do what you know to do, the more you will not like yourself. The more you fix those things, the better your self-perception will become.
Most people that claim to demand to be loved for who they are are struggling about loving themselves. You cannot demand love if you already have it. You have nothing to prove.
People who do not match your view of yourself will automatically fall off. Those that do will stick around.
If you are consistently surrounded by people and situations you think you do not deserve, ask yourself why they are drawn to you. Birds of the same feather flock together?
Rather than demand to be loved, become loveable. Become loveable by becoming a person YOU GENUINELY like.
The rest will flow from that.
