In a World where we've been taught to put others first, self love can often feel selfish.
Let's begin with what is self love. Self love is the foundation of "who we are", everything builds on top of this foundation, so if it is not strong life can be shaky. Loving ourselves is the first step to love other's. As someone said: "You cannot pour from an empty cup" .
We need to give ourselves enough love to start loving others and build healthy relationships. Loving ourselves or forgiving ourselves is sometimes, not sometimes but most of the time or maybe all the time, harder than loving or forgiving someone else. Let's talk about what happens when we lack self love. Lack of self love can attract unhealthy relationships because when you truly love yourself it's hard to tolerate when someone treats you poorly. One of the main reasons we may not be able to love ourselves are when we cannot forgive ourselves for our past mistakes or the flaws that we have. Always remember that everyone makes mistakes and our mistakes lead us into what we become, because we learn through these mistakes. We usually see our flaws as scars but no, they're not scars they're the stars that makes us what we are, so let's forgive ourselves and stop hating ourselves for not being perfect.
There are many reasons why self love is important, having a good relationship with yourself is the first step to build your self esteem and self worth because when we don't love ourselves we tend to seek validation from others to determine our worth.
There was a time when I lacked self love. I remember a quote that was always stuck with me throughout that period because I could relate to it: "I am not what I think I am, I am not what you think I am, I am what I think you think I am". I started to think of myself as how I thought people perceived of me, and this always increased my anxiety and stress. But when I started to learn how to be kind to myself, it helped me to reduce my worries.
Some people think self love is narcissistic or selfish. Just a reminder, self love doesn't mean we should give ourselves a throne and think we're on top of everyone else and believe that we never make mistakes and are perfect. This behavior is called selfishness. On the other hand self love actually means to love ourselves in a healthy way knowing that we are flawed and we make mistakes, and we accept them and learn from them. As I conclude I would like to share this quote: "Self love is not vanity it is sanity"