Teaching people to love themselves

I heard it is important to teach people things. Things like, how to fish. Or perhaps teaching someone how to love themselves is an important thing to do, if possible. I can love someone but it really means nothing to the person receiving it, it’s not a thing they can experience, really. So maybe teaching someone how to love themselves is much more important than loving them at all.

The requirement to like yourself is actually quite low. First you should be alive, and second you should be conscious. Most people have learned everything they know by following someone else. Most people love themselves as much as others have demonstrated to them.

I feel shame when no one knows how to love me when I act a certain way. I see there is a big question here, people stare at me in confusion: how does this work? It makes me feel so different and apart from the universe of love that others sit in, cozily. Somehow I am outside, and I am scared to be different. I live in my body, yet somehow I am outside of my own heart.

The problem was never that I should not feel unwanted. That’s very unrealistic. Of course I am unwanted. I am unwanted all the time. Sometimes I talk too much. And at other times I am wanted. It is totally unpredictable if I am honest.

I had to ask myself, why was it so terrible to be unwanted sometimes? I couldn’t find the answer. Maybe if it threatened my life it would be bad. But I’m alive anyways.

It is one of the many things I’ve learned to stop bothering myself about.