Every day boys and girls wake up and take a look in the mirror. Why is it common to hate what you see? Why is it common to want to change the way you are? There’s a difference between wanting to change in a healthy way and truly wanting to get healthy and better yourself rather than wanting to change who you are as a person.

When receiving compliments, the auto-response is to deny and argue against it. Why has society trained us into being okay with not being okay? In adults’ minds, it’s more important for teens to get an A in a class than to be happy. It’s a corrupt way to think about life because in order for grades and overall well being to improve mental stability should be on the top of the list of priorities. It’s acceptable to stay home from school for physical sickness but not for mental sickness.

Mental health controls many aspects of everyone’s life and should be taken completely seriously. It’s not normal to feel sad all the time even though that’s what is brought up through social media and through other people. People are hated because they’re happy because people are jealous. You could ask anyone in the school if they love themselves and more than likely the most common answer will be no. People focus on the flaws instead of the perfections about themselves. The journey to self-love isn’t an easy task and that’s because most important and serious matters take effort and that’s hard to give sometimes. Sometimes life can be exhausting and school doesn’t make it any better.

In order to start the journey to self-love, you have to learn that it’s okay to put yourself first. Asking around, people say that they care about others more than they care about themselves. It is an important character trait to care about people but it shouldn’t be to a point where you solely depend on others for emotional support. You need to learn to depend on yourself before you depend on others. Being dependent is a skill that’s learned in time and through experience. Most of the time having to learn this lesson comes with a lot of pain and a lot of hurt.

If you don’t have a stable relationship with yourself, then you can’t possibly have a stable relationship with anyone else. This goes along with the dependence aspect, but always searching for that missing piece of your happiness can’t be found in other people. Self-love truly is like a puzzle because there’s so many different pieces and aspects of it even when just one piece of it is missing the whole picture doesn’t come together.  If you try and put two different puzzle pieces together, they don’t fit without a lot of effort and a lot of change. You need to complete the puzzle with things that help you.

Just because the path to self-love needs to be an inner thing doesn’t mean it has to be done completely alone. There’s a reason group therapy exists; you need people with the same healthy mentality. It’s not good to let other unhealthy people in your life when you’re not healthy. It’s okay to always be there for a friend, but sometimes you need to step away and check and make sure that their issues aren’t adding to your own and help them but don’t put them before you.

Another step in the road to self-love is to realize that you need help. Living in denial only lets the mentally draining thoughts run wild. Sometimes you need to think about what you’re thinking about. A lot of the time your greatest enemy is yourself. You need to be close to the enemy if you’re ever going to conquer it. Being careless with the thoughts that run through your head is how the self-hate thrives because you’re giving your mind the power to bring you down. If you tell yourself you’re beautiful enough times you’ll soon begin to believe it. When you look in the mirror instead of nitpicking every issue you see you should pick out what you like and focus on it. At first, it may be hard to find something to love but after you find that one thing and truly start to love it you’ll slowly but surely begin to love yourself. A few ideas to remind you that you’re worth it is to write things that you’re insecure about and write a compliment about it.

Another way to help you feel better is to help others feel good. If you think someone looks good, tell them. Sometimes something as simple as a compliment can help someone more than you would know.

The age-old saying of treating others the way you want to be treated is true but it also should pertain to yourself. Why would you treat someone else better than you would treat yourself?

The journey to self-love is a hard one but once you complete it, it’s worth all the pain because once you’re happy with yourself life falls back into place.