Love Yourself

I know, I know, as if there wasn’t enough pink and red everywhere now this post is about love?  Gross! Well it’s not as limited to what you think, so hang around for a bit longer.  As a single-30-something-male who is a hopeless romantic, I understand that the love stuff at this time of year is overwhelming.  I’ve been inundated with marketing and images of Valentine’s Day just like you.  But that inevitable day sits at the end of this week with a smug grin on its face waiting for people to max out credit cards on flowers, dinner and jewelry.  For many of us, it’s enough bombardment that I’ve heard some people use a four letter expletive as an action verb towards the day.  If you’re in a relationship or newly dating, it might be different.  There’s a lot of pressure placed on you to make the day special with roses, chocolates, or going to a fictional store character named Jared to spend a hefty part of your pay check as a monetary confirmation of your love.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve been guilty before of participating in the mass consumerism that has come with Valentine’s Day; but through relationships and dating (good and bad experiences) I have begun to see love differently.  Our society and media whips us into a frenzy of magical love whether it’s an episode of the ‘Bachelor’ or that woman who sings “Every kiss begins with Kay”.  It teaches us that to truly know love, is to have a significant other who sweeps us off our feet, as we melt in their arms the same way they melt into ours.  I disagree.  I’m not a cynic and it’s not that I think it’s impossible to find that kind of love, but love comes in so many different forms beyond just that of a relationship with a significant other.

The commercialized love leads many of us to forget that every day we feel love from our families, our friends and most importantly our self.  Yes.  Our self.  The most important person you can and will ever love is the person you see in the mirror every day.  This isn’t where I launch into a diatribe that sounds like a single person’s manifesto bringing solidarity among single folks, that’s not what this is about.  The reality is whether you are in a relationship or not, no one can validate you more than you can validate yourself.  You don’t need to and should never rely on someone else’s acceptance of you to make you feel good about yourself.

I’m aware that much of this comes down to self-confidence.  Your self-confidence can be assembled through a variety of different forms whether it’s an outward physical appearance, the way you dress, your personality type, the hobbies that you have, etc.   We are judged every day by these things, and unless you meet a socially constructed stereotypical deal in all of them, there is a great chance that your self-confidence might be a bit damaged.  Perhaps you’ve been shamed into thinking you’re not good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, tall enough, feminine enough, masculine enough and the list goes on and on.  At the end of the day however it’s vital to your own happiness that you find validation from within, and block out the negativity ridiculing you, or making you feel uncomfortable in your own skin.  You need to love you, for being you.

Take the time to perfect the things about yourself that you enjoy and love, instead of trying to do the things you think someone else will like about you.  There is nothing wrong with a little self-improvement and wanting to make ourselves a better person, but do it for you.  We are in a constant state of change through maturing, and learning new things.  It works very similar to home improvement.  We find something we don’t like about ourselves and put in the time, work, and effort to make it better.  The caveat is not getting caught up in curb appeal.  Don’t change yourself to live up to someone else’s standard, change yourself to live up to your own standard.  Remember, the most important person you can ever love is yourself.  Without loving yourself, you can easily fall victim to losing yourself.  With such a loss, the talents, ideas, hopes and dreams that you have can be lost as well.    

Some of you might still be caught up in the romance of Valentine’s Day and the idea of searching for Mr. or Mrs. Right.  I see a wife in my future as well, and that magical everlasting romance is something I want for myself, but the reality is that that type of love is hard.  Even in romance you need to love yourself first.  If you can’t get through the challenge of loving yourself first, then you’re never truly ready or secure enough to meet the challenge of loving someone else and you will settle.  You will inevitably settle for someone who you shouldn’t be with.  You need to reach a high level of self-love so that when someone else loves you, you can recognize that it’s not just your bank account, a fleeting infatuation, or lust awakening their loins that makes them love you.  You can be secure in the fact that it’s genuine love for who you are as a person.  You need to know yourself to know the love that you expect and deserve.

You’re the only you.  So through all your uniqueness, you need to see how beautiful you are in all your multifaceted ways.  Love yourself first and foremost and then be willing to accept the love of those around you.

Thankful for Good...and Bad?

As the Thanksgiving Holiday draws closer by the hour, we see on many social media networks people asking friends to post what they are thankful for.  This is certainly the perfect season to be pensive of what we appreciate and to share that gratitude with our friends and family as we all get together and reconnect this upcoming weekend.  There is plenty in my life that I am grateful for, and the ease of creating such a list is something in and of itself I am thankful for.  I won’t bore you with my full inventory here, but as I watched others post their thankful lists on Facebook, some by the day, others by the week, I started to notice a pattern.  I noticed that so many things were related to family, pets, jobs, and all around very positive feel-good type things.  This got me to start thinking (not in a scrooge bah-humbug way) but what about the not-so-good things; can we be thankful for those too?  In that moment, I found this week’s blog.

I started to think about the potential for being thankful for the unconventional not-so-good things that people usually aren’t thankful for.  I wondered if I could still be thankful for some of those things even though in the moment it was painful and difficult and the answer was, “Yes”.  You’re probably thinking I went off the deep end and how could that be so, but it’s possible.  I’ve written about finding a silver lining in a previous post titled ‘When Life Happens…’ but this is something a little bit different.  I’m referring to being thankful for something after the event or occurrence has happened in a reflection for how it has contributed to making us a better and stronger person, not just finding something positive in the moment to get through it.  I’m also not saying you should be thankful for every bad thing that has happened to you, but there are some that might not be as bad when we look back on it.

A prime personal example of that was the end of my dream of becoming a doctor.  As a child, adults always ask, “What you want to be when you grow up?”.  For as long as I can remember my answer was consistently ‘A doctor’.  In college my experiences coaching youth basketball, volunteering as a mentor for kids, and substitute teaching narrowed my answer down to ‘A Pediatrician’.  The next thing I knew I was walking across the stage with a Pre-Med Physiology degree, but I had received rejection letters from the medical schools that I applied to.  Instead of becoming a Pediatrician, I pursued a Master’s Degree in Health Communications.  While in that program I was an Assistant Hall Director and discovered and built a career in Student Affairs.  I couldn’t have been more thankful for those med. school rejection letters because student affairs (Residence Life to be specific) was where I had some of the most amazing experiences, and met an abundance of wonderful people, staff and students.  At the time yes, the rejection letters were devastating, but I could never have predicted such a bright light at the end of the tunnel and looking back on it, I am thankful for what it lead to.

When asked what we are thankful for we tend to focus on the easy things that make us happy and that are positive. There’s nothing wrong with that because that’s great, I always encourage positivity.  But it’s also important to reflect on the tough times that have made us who we are today.  The things many people focus on as regrets, are instead the events and occurrences that have given us an opportunity to be stronger, smarter, and better people.  I’m not saying you should ruin your Thanksgiving by flooding your thoughts with bad stuff that has happened to you.  However it is important to think about the things that have made you who you are today, that may not have been ideal at the time but now could be something you would be thankful for happening because without it, you would never be who you are today.  We should learn to live our lives with no regrets.  Stop looking back and saying “I could’ve, would’ve, should’ve”.  The bottom line is that it happened, and you can move forward carrying with you the knowledge and experience gained to make your own life and the lives of others better.  We can be thankful for those times as well as everything else that is feel-good and positive.