Sorry for the delay in postings, I've been a bit busy saving people's worlds and trying to keep debt collectors from showing up at my doorstep with large men in suits. =p Today I'd like to talk about Love, not the love that you have with a wife or a family or a pet. Rather the love that's most important to all of us but always put last. I'm talking about the love that we have for ourselves. Loving ourselves is one of the biggest steps we can take towards being happy... Loving ourselves is one of the biggest steps we can take towards being happy.... And I don't just mean "i'm happy with who I am--i just want to be more cause my life sucks" I mean full on make-out sessions with our lives.Even the tiniest of doubts will slowly grow like a rip in your favorite pair of jeans. But unlike those stylish jeans, having tears in ourselves will just lead to being miserable. So it's important to have faith in yourself and to understand this is an all or nothing kind of deal. The first step is to realize that you are worth loving, always and forever, inside and out. There is no ifs or buts. No criteria. You deserve the love just as much as joe shmoe, obama, jesus, and everybody else or thing that's ever existed. Do not say "oh I can't love myself because I'm this or I'm still not happy with where I am" Like I said there is no criteria. Realize that you are already perfect, anyway. Jobs, friends, money, are all superfluous to the state of being happy. Yes it helps when you have great friends or make 6 figures, but it's most definitely NOT necessary. These things just mask the insecurities we have, and don't actually squelch them entirely. So all you poor schmucks like me can be happiest you'll ever be, too! And knowing that you're already perfect is also a large step towards conquering your insecurities towards life, too. Insecurity means that there is something about yourself that you feel is sub par or bad or not interesting or whatever. Everybody is aware of some of the larger insecurities of life (being attractive, wealthy, popular, etc...) but the easiest way to figure out what your subconscious insecurities is to look at the things that you don't like. Any object, event or ANYTHING that provokes negative emotion can be traced back towards an underlying insecurity that we possessed. When we have these negative emotions towards the outside world, it's just a mere reflection of how we really feel about a part of ourselves. If you've taken psychology and understand it's pretty much a overblown version of the defense mechanism projection. we project everything we feel about ourselves on to the outside world happiness or sadness. So how do you love yourself? By loving everything around you and all the people and things that exist in this world. There are no standards for who and what deserves love and who or what doesn't. Is it really our place to decide who doesn't deserve love (And don't say "they do, just not me"). Love is unconditional, my friends. All you have to do is just realize that they are just as perfect as everybody else, and that loving them isn't about what they've done, but it's about you being able to open up your heart with the utmost confidence in yourself. People are quick to deny love because they're afraid of being hurt. Tracing back a bit to what it means to be hurt. Remember how we talked about finding the roots of negative emotion in our insecurties? So if we're hurt it means that we feel insecure, looking at it logically. Which is understandable, when people take advantage of us we feel neglected or unimportant. But the fact of the matter is you have to realize that we create these feelings ourselves. They did not hurt us because they were able to, we were hurt because we decided to be hurt. We make ourselves insecure. Nobody can control our thoughts except ourselves and for some stupid reason we are conditioned to believe that our self worth is defined by the actions that other people take Once you realize that what other people do has NO FUCKING IMPACT on the actual person that you are. You stop putting such a huge weight on other people. You stop letting what they do influence your mood. You don't care about what the oc-bitch said. And you stop judging people too. being judgemental is the complete antithesis to love. You can't love somebody 100% if you judge them. And you stop judging them when you realize that what they do doesn't hurt the person that you are, and you can stop being insecure about the person that you are if you know that you're in control, and once you're secure about yourself you can love yourself. And once you love yourself, you can love the world! | 
