It’s okay to feel a little lost sometimes. Like you look at yourself and you’re just unsure.

Maybe people have made you feel that way. Like it’s you that’s doing something wrong.

Maybe you’ve loved others so hard and didn’t get it reciprocated that you forgot what loving yourself even felt like.

You say and do everything they want you too and then you realize you don’t even know what you want anymore.

You’ve clung to toxic relationships and relationships that really weren’t healthy for you, in an attempt to keep it alive but all it did was pull you more away from yourself.

It’s hard to lose yourself to someone you try desperately to keep.

You start to fall out of love with the person you become because suddenly you are jumping through hoops to try and keep the attention of someone who was never going to be impressed in the first place.

You lose your self-worth and sense of self-respect loving people that hard. When you are willing to do anything for them regardless of how they treat you, they lose respect for you too.

Suddenly your happiness is associated with them. Then you realize as they come and go it affects your emotions much more than it should.

And when they leave it almost feels like you lost yourself because you invested so much into them.

When someone leaves and you see it more of a loss to you than it is to them that’s when you have to reevaluate your relationship with yourself.

And you can spend a lot of time trying to understand and you’ll never get those answers you are looking for. Or you can simply accept what is and let go of what isn’t and try and move forward understanding sometimes the first steps begins with evaluating the person looking back at you in the mirror.

If you want to improve your relationships improve the relationship you have with yourself first.

It’s okay to lose yourself to people and relationships but once you do you are left with two choices you can either look back at who you were, or you can let go of that person entirely and become someone you are proud of.

The past is supposed to shape you and help you to learn it isn’t supposed to haunt you.

Learning to fall back in love with yourself won’t happen overnight. It’s a process.

1. You have to learn to forgive.

And it’s not just forgiving someone who hurt you, it’s forgiving yourself for allowing someone to have that much control on over your happiness and wellbeing.

2. It’s taking ownership of your life.

Realizing all of it comes down to you and how you react to things not someone else. Realizing someone else’s choices of whether they stay or go or love you or choose not to shouldn’t reflect how you feel about yourself.

It’s realizing while you were pointing at everyone else you should have been pointing at yourself because no one can fix you, no one can love you, no one can teach you how to be happy if you don’t figure it out for yourself.

3. It’s about letting go.

Let go of the past. Let go of the people who burned you. Let go of everything that never worked out instead of letting it bottle up inside you. Let go of negativity and self-doubt and pain. Because sometimes we hurt ourselves without realizing we are the ones doing it.

4. It’s about redefining self-worth in self-love in ways you never have before.

It’s taking a step back and realizing maybe you aren’t ready for a relationship and even if you meet someone you might be interested in, you don’t jump into it because you don’t want to fall back into the pattern of allowing a relationship to define your worth.

It’s listening closely to the way you talk to yourself and changing the conversation when it’s negative. It’s looking at your reflection and not being fixated on your flaws and things you can’t change but looking at a trait you admire and giving yourself a compliment.

It’s taking a step back and instead of building everyone up like you are used to, you realize you are special too.

Then you get to a point where those relationships that hurt you and didn’t work out, you realize it happened because you deserve better.

But you had to realize that yourself first. You had to give your all. You had to lose yourself to someone else. You had to fall apart and pick up the pieces of a broken heart that only tried to find love to fix themselves only to realize fixing yourself happens not in the arms of someone else or in the love you find but rather the love you find within yourself first.

And it’s only then you can really say I’m ready for a relationship.

5. It’s looking back without regrets.

It’s when you realize you don’t have to try as hard as you did in the past to impress someone because your time and attention is worth more than any gestures trying to prove your worth.

It’s looking in the past, the backflips you did trying to impress someone and you aren’t angry or bitter you’re just happy to not be at that place anymore where you feel you have to overcompensate to keep someone.

It’s looking at your relationships and suddenly having the self-respect to only choose people who choose you and you let go of the rest not thinking those who leave is a loss to you anymore or something you’ve done wrong.

It’s accepting that some relationships will never work out no matter how hard you try.

6. It’s learning to love yourself.

For exactly who you are. For exactly how hard you’ve loved. For exactly how hard you’ve tried both to get it right and make yourself right. Because you’ve never stopped trying to improve.

Love the person you were even if in that moment you didn’t. Because it takes a very special person to love others when they haven’t quite figured it out themselves. It takes a very special person to give all of themselves to a point you feel lost.

And it takes an even greater person to pick themselves up after that and try to find out the person they want to be when it hurts to realize you don’t know those answers.

Because you walk away from all this learning, learning about the person you were, understanding why you felt the need to try as hard as you did, and realizing you’re never going to be that person again or do that, that’s what it is all about.

It’s taking a step back and standing still when in the past you might have run towards someone a little too quickly and letting them come to you.

When you learn to fall back in love with yourself, you learn to attract the right type of person. And it’s that person who will give you the loved you pinned after, the love you tried too hard to give, the love you’ve wanted for so long.

But to get a great love means saving some for yourself. Because when you love too much it leaves you empty. When the love you give is even, you’ll never feel like you’ve lost yourself to it.