Love Yourself Today (and every other day too)

So today is Valentines Day, as I’m sure many of you are aware or maybe you’re not who knows, but I know people have a lot of different feelings about this holiday. I’m sure some of you love it, or hate it, or maybe you are indifferent or think it’s silly. I just wanted to share some advice about today for those of you who don’t have a valentine today. I just turned 26 so I guess I’m in my late 20’s now, but this is mostly for younger girls, and boys too.

First I’d just like to say I’m bad at relationships and love in general. I’ve never really been in a relationship that lasted longer than a few weeks, with the exception of one, but we didn’t live in the same state so maybe that’s why it worked for so long. I’ve been in what I thought were relationships, but weren’t that’s sort of confusing though and maybe for another post. I guess what I’m trying to say is I know a lot about not being in a relationship, so I thought I’d share some of my wisdom on that subject today.

I still remember the first year of elementary school that you didn’t have to give valentines to everyone in the class. The day before in class we still all made our little bags for cards and candy to place on our desks, that night I spent a good two hours filling out cards for the whole class (I went to a small school with only about 25 people in my entire grade) I picked cutesy ones for the girls and put serious consideration into which cards to give the boys and what to write on them. I think I ended up throwing out all of the boys ones and redoing them, but being sure to put a heart on the envelopes of the two boys I had crushes on. The next day I went and gave everyone their cards and quickly hurried back to my seat. I had about four cards in there, but people were still handing them out, when all was said and done I had about eights cards in that bag I’d worked so hard on. Needless to say I was crushed, I didn’t have many friends, but at the time it still hurt a lot. I decided that day love was stupid and that I hated Valentines day.

I made it a point to skip valentines day from that point on even though we did have parties and stuff, I continued this until about junior or senior year. I went to school, but I still felt like a loser and when I graduated and got a job as a hostess I would request the day off and if I had to work I’d just feel depressed.

I felt like their was something wrong with me, this is a holiday where you were supposed to be shown you were loved. My parents would send me cards and get me things, but I felt like the only people who loved me were my family, it all made me feel like I must be unloveable. The fact that I suffered from depression as a teenager and young adult didn’t help.

Eventually I realized that there was nothing wrong with not having a date on valentines day or any other day for that matter. You don’t need someone else to make you happy. Happiness comes from with in. I myself am still working on learning to love myself, but the past few years I’ve stopped dreading valentines day. Instead of worrying about going out I devote sometime to myself. I give myself a facial or paint my nails. I just make sure I’m making myself happy and it’s for me.

So the point of this post is that it’s ok to be by yourself and as corny as it may sound corny, but just love yourself. Because people come and go in life and it may hurt to be alone sometimes, but it won’t last forever. I’m still single by the way and I’m ok with that.

What I Have Liv…

What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what—at last—I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.
”

—  The Prologue to Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography