Start of everything: Your Relationship With Yourself
When you begin your road to happiness, the first and most important thing you must attend to is to develop a good relationship with yourself. If you skip this step, everything else will fail. There is no way around it; it must be done.
The reason for this is that you are the only person in this Universe you cannot get rid of. You will spend every waking minute of the entire eternity in your own company. Every other relationship you will ever have is going to be fleeting in comparison; therefore, you MUST become a person whose company you enjoy. You will have to learn to entertain yourself more importantly than anyone else.
You are the only reliable constant in your eternal existence; you are the most important person in it. Not your children, not your spouse, you are. You are stuck with yourself. Make that a happy notion. Become a person who you love to be. More accurately; become aware of the fact you already are the person you wish to be – you just have to remind yourself of the reasons why you are who you are and insist on being it, and give yourself the permission to be it and live according to who you are.
The trick here is that other people have always had opinions about who you should be for them, and some of them have made good or at least strong arguments on it. You’ve listened to some of it… When you shouldn’t have. You think there’s something inherently wrong with you, but I guarantee there is not. No matter if you are a child-raping murderer, that is not your inherent flaw. You have no inherent flaws. Every “flaw” you find, will be an inherent perfect lovable quirk, not a flaw.
Start with this exercise.
Describe the kind of person you like. Someone who you’d LOVE to hang out with forever – another person. Write a list of things on a file or paper; I don’t care, but write it. Actually write it rather than just think of those things. Use a bullet point list if you want, but WRITE IT down.
I’ll give you some time.
After you’re happy with this perfectly likable, charming person you’ve imagined, scroll down the page and read the rest of this post.
Now. I am willing to bet that you actually did write a very good description of yourself the way you are now. Some of you just wished you could find that person in another… Most of us do, in fact. We are all a collection of our most appreciated traits, even if that makes no sense to anybody else. I wanted you to notice how much you already like yourself, the way you are.
Next, a little tweaking.
There are things in your life that aren’t perfect. Situations, circumstances, relationships. That’s almost 100% certainly the truth. There maybe huge things that are not right, but they can also be very minor, but there is something that you don’t like.
The reason for this is that the person who you are hasn’t learned to fix those things yet. Not in THIS particular situation you’re in.
This is why I say: “Even when it’s not your fault, it’s still your fault.” It also means: “Because it is your fault, it is under your control to change it.” And THAT comes from teaching yourself how to be better. How to be a person you can rely on to fix problems for yourself, so you don’t have to rely on other people so much. So you can drop unhelpful relationships whenever you need to, and just move on. Handle your own life for yourself, with the person you can count on the most: You.
You cannot change others, but you can change your own approach.
Never again make the mistake of thinking you should try and change others in order for yourself to be happier. Not only will you ruin THEIR happiness and force them into discomfort so YOU can be more comfortable, you will almost certainly either HELP THEM be better while neglecting yourself, OR lose them down the line. Your work will be wasted when you focus on changing other people. They’ll always take that lesson and someone else will benefit from it – if the change or lesson was any good at all… Alternatively, they’ll change back to what they were before you started, sooner or later… Because if you forced them into being something they don’t want to be, eventually they will learn not to listen to your bullshit and they’ll leave.
If you focus on changing other people to suit your needs, you’re making temporary superficial changes in people who will always be temporary in your life cycles, even if they’re family. That’s such a colossal waste of time and energy. Instead, learn to deal with different types of people effectively, because TYPES are consistent. You’ll learn to deal with THIS GUY, and a few years later, you find yourself in a situation with the same type of a guy and you breeze through it – see it coming a mile off. THAT is a much better use of your time. Learn to DEAL WITH, not to CHANGE people.
Stop running after things OTHER people need for their happiness.
You know how there seems to be a duality of thinking: “you have to choose between love and good sex” for instance? You don’t, you can have both, but you know how people insist this thing is better than that thing, and then, you being younger and all, run after the “better” thing without truly seeing why you want it, but you believe it to be a good thing because “everybody” keeps saying so. Your desires would lead you HERE, but your priest tells you you should do THIS instead.
The way you dismantle this illusion, you should try to become a person who understands OTHER people’s desires better. To understand THEIR situation better. You should become a person who can understand others better for your own benefit. I’m suggesting you to thrive to knowing what makes you DIFFERENT from others, because that also helps you create a better relationship with yourself, and to change your circumstance to suit you better.
You need to know why another person goes after something that is meaningless to you, and rather than blindly follow suit and run after a trophy simply because another guy wants it, concluding in a state of small panic that it must be good, or they must know of an approaching danger you know nothing about, you’ll learn to say: “Oh, so THAT’s WHY that guy is so determined to get that… That makes sense to me now, but I don’t actually want that, I want this other thing.”
There are NO people who are DESTINED to be with you.
I speak of soulmates of all kinds. NOT ONE TYPE OF THEM is FORCED to stay with you. There is no Universal law that gives you an ownership to ANY other person but yourself. Even your True Emotion Mirrors are NOT YOURS in the sense that they could not leave you if they wanted to.
If you believe in DESTINY having ordered some group of people to forever deal with your shit, you’d be gravely mistaken. They WILL get rid of you sooner rather than later if you don’t understand this basic truth; NOBODY is tied to you permanently. They don’t HAVE TO put up with your shit.
The better you are at life and relationships, the more this sounds like a promise, not a threat. TRUST ME, people who have done their work with themselves will sigh of relief knowing they don’t have to deal with any other person’s bullshit if they don’t want to do the first thing to become a better person.
Because of this fact, you HAVE TO become a person YOU will like to be, AND find people who enjoy being with the person you enjoy being… And that takes inner work and solitude.
Your job as a person in a relationship with another is to make their lives a little better.
People who haven’t done their inner work don’t realize that THEIR JOB in a relationship to another person is to make their lives somehow better. These same people tend to believe that a relationship is so that the other person can make them feel better, or that just being with someone is enough of a consolation. (It isn’t.)
If you’re with people simply for the sake of not being completely alone, you’re a relationship parasite. You HAVE TO have a relationship with yourself so you know what you can offer other people in your life. You need to make their lives more enjoyable one way or another, and they have to do the same for you. But if THEY are putting in a lot of work and effort (no matter how effortless they make it seem) don’t think they’ll feel comforted by simply you being there. They won’t.
Being alone together.
There’s two ways to be with someone without actually having a relationship with them; to either fight about nothing or to stay in peaceful silence without any communication, ever. Both strategies are aiming for the same thing: “Do not look at my flaws, I cannot tolerate you knowing who I am, just stay with me no matter what, but don’t get to know me for real, because I am so uncomfortable with who I am as a person.” Either these people fight each other constantly trying to avoid being seen, or they stay together in peaceful silence, never actually communicating so both can keep their secrets from each other. Sometimes people communicate in a “I know you didn’t mean it” -modality, where they basically say whatever to each other, and whenever it doesn’t sound good, they ignore it: “I’ll just tell myself that’s not how they truly think.”
That’s a terrible relationship, either way. That is two people being alone in the same space. Very unreliable, very fake. Very fleeting (in the cosmic sense), and cowardly.
A relationship with yourself requires some time alone.
You have to communicate with yourself in order to have a relationship with yourself. You have to ask yourself questions and answer them. You have to criticize yourself at times. You have to be hard on yourself at times. You have to give yourself a failing grade sometimes. You have to be critical of yourself and sometimes, you have to give yourself credit.
And you always have to decide how you could have done it better than you did before.
You have to learn to entertain yourself; to amuse yourself. To point out fun things you see around you – to yourself.
For these conversations with self, you’ll need time alone. Maybe not a whole lot, but at times, you need to take stock with yourself. Otherwise, you’ll… Never find yourself, and you’ll never find happiness, peace with yourself, and you’ll never find people who genuinely love you.
If you don’t know who you are and you’re not proud of yourself because you don’t know what would make you proud of yourself, if you don’t know how to enjoy being you, nobody else will, either. You’ll be a breathing blob that others just walk around, not stop for an actual conversation, because within you, there is nothing to discuss in the first place.
You HAVE TO do yourself a favor and get to know yourself. Otherwise, you’ll remain a breathing, useless blob forever.
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*) Term changed after this post was originally written. Fractions of old terms may exist elsewhere in the post. Read about term updates.
**) Narcissists are Young Souls left alone to survive and they're doing their best. Their emotional age ranges from 3 to 17 -year old. The younger, the more severe the narcissism.
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