"You should love yourself first-" 🤚🏾
Yeah, but...can we stop saying this?
Hey, Sad Girls!
I’ve been going live on TikTok every day to promote my latest Kickstarter campaign (I’ll share more about that below), and we got into a topic that genuinely makes my eye twitch. The idea of “loving yourself first” and the devaluing of connections after they’ve ended.
Now, I understand the sentiment. If you don’t have a strong sense of self before getting to know new people, you may make choices that don’t serve you. You may abandon yourself in pursuit of affection. You may hold onto fading connections longer than you should. I get that. However, most of the time, I still don’t like how the statement “love yourself first” is framed.
Someone’s lamenting over feeling lonely? Toss them a “Girl, you need to love yourself first,” and they’ll snap right into serving, right?
A friend’s expressing heartbreak over a loss of connection? Just shrug and say, “Girl, it’s their loss. Why are you crying over them? They’re this and that and this and that…”And just like that, their feelings will dissolve, evaporated away by the wave of your dismissive hand…right?
Wrong.
How can people be expected to love themselves if they’ve never been loved by someone else? How can they feel valued if no one’s ever valued them? We learn about ourselves, who we are, and what we stand for by interacting with other people. A life spent in isolation doesn’t lead to any growth. No one’s around to challenge you, to lift you up, or to show you you’re worth loving—even when you feel broken.
The most love I ever felt was when I was going through the worst depression of my life. That’s when people showed up for me. Friends called me. Visited me. Bought me gifts. Forced me out of bed. In those moments, I couldn’t love myself. So other people loved me for me.
And you know what? Many of the ones who helped me through my storms were imperfect. Maybe someone from the outside looking in would’ve told me to leave them behind. That I could “do better” and it would be “their loss”. But to me, nothing is ever a “their loss” because when connections go sour, no matter what happens, I’ve lost too. It’s a mutual losing.
We’re all flawed. Traumatized. Weird. And if I abandoned certain people based on societal expectations of what I should do, I wouldn’t be here writing this today.
Telling people to just “love themselves” in response to loneliness or longing isn’t going to make them feel better. It’ll only make them feel ashamed for feeling at all.
But that’s just me! What do you think?
Tuesday’s Blues is 50% funded!
Our strange little romance comedy about a struggling musician and the monster under her bed is halfway funded after one week! Check out a sample comic our artist, Whytmanga, created:
Haaaa. This will not be in the final book, but it’s still very fun and very much the kind of humor you’ll find in Tuesday’s Blues! Like everything I write, it’ll be absurd, darkly funny, and this time around, there’s a little bit of, well, spice!
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The Random:
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I completely agree, like we mentioned yesterday on the live, let me be sad! People move at their own pace and I personally have the capacity to love myself & be sad at the same time. Going through a rough break up, I’ve done all the self care, the sitting with myself, the retail therapy, the meeting new friends. But still, months later I am still sad thinking about my ex & how things ended. I still fight tears whenever I encounter something that reminds me of her, bc even though she did severely hurt me I can still recognize that she did her best in the situation just like I did and I’m not perfect either. These things can be so nuanced, you don’t immediately have to hate a person and forget about them once they do you wrong. Especially if you’re a person that cares deeply. It’s just not realistic, I think I’ll always care for this person who hurt me and it’s more so about learning how to live with that and letting people go while respecting your boundaries — and that’s very hard. People need permission from their loved ones to take their time to process how they feel. All we need sometimes is some reassurance and a listening ear. Dismissing emotions will never help.
Agreed! I already love myself, even during my darkest moments, and even if I didn't, that doesnt change anything. I can't be loved because I don't love myself?
What kind of nonsense is that?
As someone who has, essentially raised my own self, I've never felt more lonely in my entire life.