There’s a lot of reasons you should try to love yourself. A lot of it is marketed to us in the form of health - eating a certain way, exercising, skincare, hygiene, vacations, mental health, etc. A healthy life is a good life!
But I want to talk about another reasons to prioritize self-care and love, and not in the sense of general wellbeing and healthcare. A truth I live by is the idea that it is impossible to love someone else more than you love yourself. Not impossible because you would be unwilling to do so, or because the effort is too high, but because loving is a skill.
We often think about love as an emotion, as something we feel. We love our parents, our friends, and ourselves. But love is just as much about how you express it, and expressing love is a skill. It’s something you can be better or worse at, independently of how much you feel you love someone.
It’s easy to see this with toxic relationships. Why do couples that have screaming arguments every week stay together? Why do abusive parents tell their children they still love them? Most of the time, it’s because they still feel love, and are totally clueless on how to express it adequately.
Getting better at love, the skill, is a matter of practice, and I believe it starts with being good at loving yourself. Whatever type of support you want to be able to offer other people, you have to be at least as good at for yourself. If you want to serve good food to your friends and family, you need to start by learning to make good food for yourself. If you want to be able to support your partner emotionally when they’re down, you need to be able to do that for yourself too. If you want to be good at empathizing with other people’s emotions, you need to learn to recognize and accept your own. If you want to be patient with others, you must be patient with yourself.
More often than not, shitty exes and abusive parents are people that are incapable of loving themselves, not people that don’t love you. If that’s not someone you want to be, consider giving yourself grace, time to reflect, tasty and good food, a little bit of exercise, and working out your insecurities!