Your purpose in life is not to love yourself but to love being yourself.
If you goal is to love yourself, then your focus is directed inward toward yourself, and you end up constantly watching yourself from the outside, disconnected, trying to summon the “correct” feelings towards yourself or fashion yourself into something you can approve of.
If your goal is to love being yourself, then your focus is directed outward towards life, on living and making decisions based on what brings you pleasure and fulfillment.
Be the subject, not the object. It doesn’t matter what you think of yourself. You are experiencing life. Life is not experiencing you.
Thank you this is the first post about self love that hasn’t made me want to throw things
“No-one would dare write a story like hers, nor ever could and still hope to make it half as interesting, or half as believable, as what really transpired. Born into a life of aristocratic privilege to a father whose love was never anything less than conditional and very often cruel, educated at the courts of the two most powerful and magnificent empires in Christendom, nurtured in the decadent world of the European aristocracies, she had been a dazzling debutante, an accomplished courtier, a talented musician and the muse of poets, songwriters and playwrights. Glamour, sophistication, charm and charisma had been hers in abundance. Then, whilst at the height of her youth and beauty, she had captured the attention of the most powerful Sovereign ever to reign in the British Isles. For her, consumed by obsession and a desire to possess, he had turned the world upside down and the continent had echoed to the sound of the roar she had created in her homeland. At long last, she had been crowned queen in unprecedented splendour, in a dress shimmering with a county’s worth of jewels and pearls. Archbishops had knelt before her, foreign rulers had showered her with gifts, evangelicals had celebrated her as God’s Chosen Nymph and for a moment, all too brief, the world had been hers. Then, with a gradient of catastrophe so unparalleled it still has the power to boggle the imagination, she was dragged from her throne and a one thousand-roomed palace, to be left here, kneeling, alone, in the sawdust, waiting for the sword to strike at a neck that had once inspired poetry and glittered with diamonds.” –Gareth Russel