Those Who Doubt You Will Never Love You 

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To the ones who made me doubt myself,

Thank you.

I am enough.

I don’t need your approval. I don’t need your validation.

I don’t need you.

I thought your approval meant the world to me. I thought that by accepting me, you’ll make it easier for me to accept myself. I thought that maybe if you love me, I could love myself too.

But then I realized it’s dangerous to give that power to someone else and it’s even more dangerous when that someone doesn’t know you, doesn’t see you or doesn’t appreciate you.

It’s dangerous to ask someone else to paint your picture when they can’t paint, when they can’t even see the details that make you beautiful and when they can’t discern the scars that shape you.

It’s dangerous to ask for reassurance from the ones who are unsure about you.

It’s dangerous to wait for someone else to give you what you’re looking for without trying to find it in yourself first. Without trying to find it in the world first.

It’s easy for people to doubt you, it’s easy for them to bring you down, it’s easy for them to break you and walk away. It’s easy for people to hurt you.

But it’s so much harder to love. It takes strength to love someone. It takes courage to accept someone with their flaws and it takes a lot of self-love to purely love another person, to lift them up and to make them see their own greatness.

And it’s easy for us to think that we’re the problem, that our flaws are unbearable, that we push people away and that we’ll never be good enough because it’s easier to believe that it’s our problem instead of letting people go. Instead of kicking someone out of our lives when we want them to stay.

But if someone makes you doubt yourself, if someone makes you feel like you’re too much to handle or you’re hard to live with, ask yourself if it’s really you or is it because that person is incapable of loving you? Is this person just making excuses because they’re looking for a way out? Is this person struggling with self-love? Is this person using you for their own validation without considering how you really feel?

I won’t lie and say that those who doubted me made me love myself completely, but they definitely made me stop and think about their words before believing them. They made me question them before assuming it’s me. They made me doubt them before I doubt myself.

The truth is, no one is perfect and it’s easy to blame others for our own insecurities, but sometimes it’s really not you, sometimes it’s how manipulative and insecure the other person is. Sometimes it’s because they’re jealous of you or because they’re fighting a battle that they don’t want to tell you about.

At the end of the day, I learned that doubting myself is never going to make me grow, but letting the ones who doubt me go will always pave the way for better people to come into my life; people who believe in me and see the potential that I can’t even see in myself. People who don’t doubt me even when I doubt myself. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Rania Naim is a poet and author of the new book All The Words I Should Have Said, available here.

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Writing makes me feel alive. Words heal me.

Keep up with Rania on Instagram

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