how to love yourself
Mikasacus recently made a video titled "how to actually love yourself"1 in which he details his own journey towards discovering self-love:
I learned that self-love means giving yourself acceptance for your very being, accepting your flaws, quirks, and failures as a part of you and choosing to respect yourself despite your perceived shortcomings. It means treating yourself with the same respect you would treat anyone else with. You wouldn't tell someone something even half as cruel as the things you tell yourself. So why would you tell yourself those things?
His overall message comes down to self-love being something not about vanity but about developing a deep sense of self-assurance, acceptance, and trust with yourself. True self-love involves treating oneself with kindness, respect, and understanding, akin to how one would treat a close friend.
I really love how he phrased self-love as treating someone how you would a close friend, because at the end of the day you are your own biggest supporter. If you don't treat yourself with the same kindness and respect you would treat other people with, you're going to be lonelier, more isolated, and more alienated from yourself and from the people that care about you.
I've always struggled with self-love myself, telling myself that I didn't deserve it because I wasn't doing good enough and beating myself up over tiny errors. Mikasacus describes an exercise to help with this feeling in the same video:
Picture someone you deeply love and would take a bullet for. Now imagine that one day you came across a witch and your bodies were swapped. What choices are you going to make? You are now responsible for the well-being and nourishment of someone you care very deeply about, so what are you going to do? You're gonna do everything you can to set them up for success right?
He tells us that whatever we are willing to do for this person, and whatever feelings of love and respect we feel for this person, we need to start feeling towards ourselves. The way we treat our friends and loved ones is completely from how we treat ourselves, but the way we treat them is how we should be treating ourselves.
Self-love doesn't mean that you're a narcissist, it means that you treat yourself with kindness, respect, patience, and understanding. The same way you would treat another person you cared about if they were in a difficult situation.
8/31
Highly recommend checking out his other videos as well!↩