Do You Love Yourself?
To truly love yourself… what an awesome feeling that must be.
A friend reached out to me this morning and told me she’s overthinking a new relationship that she’s in. According to her, the new guy is great. In every way. They gel really nicely, and he doesn’t seem to be giving off any “red flag” vibes. Which sounds great… but is always trouble for people like her & I. Having somebody care about you and treat you good is always suspicious, because who deserves that?
You see… it can be really tough for some people to feel good about themselves, because we’re with ourselves ALL the time, and we feel all the feelings we feel. The human heart/mind/soul is a messy place, full of contradictions and primitive tendencies, and when you dwell on your own perceived shortcomings, it becomes easy to only recognize those, and to think you’re a kind of a POS. So any affection is suspicious, right? If they only knew what you know, they’d stay far away, right?
That’s bunk. Because they’ve got all that too… and they see in you what you’ve lost sight of.
Take this recent example of mine… I had a kidney stone this weekend. I posted about it, and I was completely awash with hundreds of messages of people who were sending me thoughts and prayers and well-wishes for a speedy recovery. They could very easily have just moved on with their life, but I heard from practically everybody I’ve ever known. They didn’t have to do that. It benefitted them exactly zero to tell me they were thinking about me. This wasn’t a triumph of mine that they were congratulating me on… it was a medical problem where the best possible outcome is for me to be back to normal. And I spent the entire weekend fielding messages from people who care.
This is exactly my point. At some point, I must have done something for them to feel like I’m a good person worthy of love and attention. I am blessed to be in a job where I have gotten to affect a lot of lives, so my number of people caring is higher than most, but it was still an overwhelming number of people caring. The only reasonable conclusion is… maybe I AM worthy of love.
It’s hard for me to see sometimes. I know all my worst things, and it’s very easy for me to privately curse myself. But everybody has those worst things. We’re all human; we all feel negativity and hate and scorn. But we do good things, and we should probably all take a beat and remember that we’re probably worthy of being recognized for those good things.
~Jake from 98.7 The Bull
