Loving Myself

Valentine's Day is upon us, and that means a lot of people will be taking their significant others out to a bar, local restaurant, or whatever movie is hot at the theatre right now as a way of showing them how much they love that person.  There'll be fancy gifts, chocolate and flowers, and awkward shoutouts on radio shows, all for the people we love or the crushes we think like us back, though that exercise in thought is usually futile and usually doesn't produce anything besides wasted time and a heavy broken heart.

However, not everyone is deeply in love with someone this Valentine's Day, and that segment of the population includes me amongst other people.  Today, I'm sitting in my room (it's too cold to go outside) and chatting with a few friends while also planning to maybe watch the new Big Mouth double episode "My Furry Valentine" a little later on while ordering pizza in and finishing off the pasta I cooked for last night's episode of my radio show.  In short, it sounds like the perfect Italian Valentine's Day, and I joked with my co-hosts yesterday that maybe my life calling was to be a pasta chef at an Italian vineyard making pasta for people who visit.  The "valentine" isn't part of the equation here for me, but it is a day for some self-love and taking time for myself, which is equally important in my mind as I continue to navigate the myriad of mental health.

My "love life" if we're even calling it that, has been colorful to say the least.  I've met, interacted with, and subsequently broken off contact or had contact broken off with a lot of wonderful people, some of whom were great friends before this happened.  It always sucks when a failed romantic attempt comes with the cost of a friendship, but as some have told me, it's better off that way apparently.  So, I've been trying to get better at the pickup from that moment when everything seems to come crashing down around you, and also working on not just bouncing from crush to crush seeing if something might finally stick.  I've noted in the past year that I tend to place a little too much value on relationships, and I've also realized that I fail to love myself for who I am, so I've been trying to learn to "love myself before I can love others" so to speak.  The "love of my life" hasn't quite bounced across my line of sight just yet, but I feel like we're getting closer perhaps.

Back in high school, my history teacher referred to the great letdown of a breakup or a crush not being mutual feelings as this.  "You've just got to go home and cry while eating ice cream and watching The Notebook."  Now of course this was meant as humorous (and I always saw it that way myself and have never done it myself), but I think it's worth pointing out here that this line has some truth.  When a relationship goes bad, it can be too easy to immediately sit and spend time contemplating and obsessing over what we did wrong and enter a deep depressive state thinking that we're suddenly the worst person in the world and that no one will ever genuinely want our company again.  But the key to get out of that is to hold your self-esteem in high regard to begin with, while of course retaining that key level of humbleness and humility.

One of my co-workers recently told me "You can't worry what other people think about you or hold what they say in an important state of mind."  I'm totally guilty of that, and I'm willing to wager that some of you reading this might be guilty too.  It can be so easy to take something that someone says and immediately assume they're being serious, or assume their actions are because you did something wrong, when that wasn't always the case and might not ever be.  We have to take care of ourselves and remember that what they say doesn't matter in the end, because at the close of the day, it's what we do with our time that matters most.

So today, either go out and enjoy the day with your S.O. or yourself, or sit down and have a day in with yourself and your pets, realizing you shouldn't need a lover to be happy in the end because you are what matters most of all.  Get on out and enjoy!  Happy Valentine's Day!