“How do you become real?” asked the Velveteen Rabbit.
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
This is an excerpt from one of my favourite children’s stories, The Velveteen Rabbit. The velveteen rabbit was a stuffed toy that belonged to a boy. The rabbit struggled with the question as to whether he was real or not, because he did not look like and was not able to move like live rabbits that he saw outside. The love of the boy, his owner, was what made the rabbit feel real, until the day a fairy finally came along and made him into a live rabbit, the same as the ones he had seen long before.
In this story, the rabbit never felt real, until the boy loved him, and treated him as such. Oftentimes, people are the same with love. They don’t feel love for themselves, until someone gives it to them. People stay in relationships, simply because they need someone else’s verification of love in order to feel good. This is sad because another person should be an addition to the love that you already have for yourself, not the only source of love that you have. When someone else is the only source of the love, what happens if they take it away? Then you have nothing left.
Look, relationships are amazing. When you find a true love and you are both in love, that force becomes stronger than the singular loves apart. However, someone’s love should be an add-on to your existing “love house”, not the whole thing. Learning to love yourself first, as the late Whitney Houston says, is “the greatest love of all”. It doesn’t have to be a boasting self-love, a “selfie everyday” love, or a “strut my stuff and show it all off love”, but just a self-accepting love. A love that says, “I like what I see in the mirror everyday, and I deserve someone to add onto that.”
I’ve struggled with that for a lot of my life, but here are 2 ways that I learned to begin the ongoing process of loving myself.
1) Build You: Self-development is one of the best ways to build self-love and self-confidence. I wish they didn’t call the bookstore section “self-help”. Help indicates to me that there is something wrong, and that is how I used to treat it. I would go to that section when I felt down, depressed, or just “blah” only. I would run into the bookstore like a migraine sufferer running down a pharmacy aisle. Developing yourself and aiming to grow should be an ongoing process. So commit to learning something new in an area that interests you all the time. Go to the bookstore, tomorrow (or today), and just find a title that interests you in the self-“development” section. Life is too short for fiction, in my opinion, so start reading something that will make you better. When you learn more, you will start to love YOU more.
2) Build Others: Offer your help to friends, family, volunteer groups, or anyone you can think of. Contrary to popular belief, I think that helping others is actually selfish too! When you help others, even if it’s giving some money to a homeless person, don’t you feel good about yourself? Even if just for a minute? THAT’S self-love!!!! Author John Maxwell has a mantra that I have adopted myself – every day I ask myself, “Who can I add value to today?” Who’s life can you make better today? It doesn’t have to be much – I corrected someone’s form at the gym the other day and gave them a couple of tips on how to intensify their workouts. They said thank you, I added value, I felt good about myself. Get in the habit of adding value to others, and you will feel more valuable yourself!
Use the “Build You / Build Others” approach and I promise that you will never be a “velveteen rabbit”. You won’t need someone else to feel real love for yourself.
