Hey Hot Stuff,
One piece of your verbal communication has pushed me to write this very letter. You applauded me for my non-verbal actions and challenged me to be more of a leader with my verbal actions; something I know I've fallen short on in the past. So these words are my attempt to inspire even more love in your communication. Love that spans all forms of communication, because the form of communication is nothing more than semantics of expressing what's inside.
While I certainly have room to improve on my communication tactics, I do feel really good about the love I have inside myself. It wasn't easy getting here, but I've been persistent about the work; mostly because I realized nothing that I receive or obtain will make me feel good for long unless I truly love myself. Not just being 'in love with myself' but actually 'loving myself'. A distinction that's as important as any point I'll make in this letter, because the former is highly likely to be silently toxic.
When someone is deeply in love with themselves, they look at themselves as the center of their own universe. That center of gravity is their ego-fueled self-image. They love that self-image and are eager to have it be validated by others. In their eyes, others serve more of a purpose to validate the self-image they're in love with than anything else. All intentions are born in self service.
To make this concept more concrete, consider someone who is in love with themselves who buys a small gift for their friend. A good action with impure motivation, as they bought the gift so that they would be seen as a good friend-- mostly to validate the piece of their self-image that they're an incredible friend. In the worse cases, the motivation is even darker, and would include things like conveying a positive self image to build trust so that they can manipulate their 'friend' for their own gain. In contrast, consider someone who loves themselves. A love that comes from more of a deep rooted self acceptance and wholesome appreciation of their character. So when they go to buy their friend a small gift, their motivation is that they feel good about themselves and they want to share that feeling with their friend.
There's so much beauty to feeling good enough about yourself that you want others to feel the same. It's beauty that's found only on the foundation of abundance, because love is truly abundant. Giving love to someone else doesn't mean that you have less and they have more. A common view of scarcity for those who are in love with themselves. Constantly thinking about how to get more for themselves and less for others so that they feel like they have more.
Now you hopefully see why it's so important to understand the distinction between loving yourself and being in love with yourself. Unfortunately, it's dangerously easy to slip down the wrong path due to misguided comprehension. But now that we've worked to reduce that risk, I feel more comfortable sharing how I've come to love myself to the point where I'm eager to share with others, especially you :).
Truly loving yourself is one of those things that's simple but really hard. I started by a deep dive on understanding myself. Mostly because it's almost impossible to love something that you can't understand. In that process, I found that we are the master's of our own identity, with the ability to chose our character. You get to craft a character that you love and stick to it.
It makes sense to pick a character that you feel is worthy to fight for and is easy to love. Knowing that being an exceptional character is hard by default. Taking above average effort by definition. Effort that you'll certainly fall short of regularly, but in the very act of striving for this exceptional character, you find radical self acceptance. Knowing that you're fighting with all your might for the character that's worthy of abundant love.
The fight is daily, but so is the abundance of love. Then, the better you get at fighting for your character, the more you'll settle into the power of abundance. Eventually arriving at a place where you feel such an abundance of love for yourself that you can't help but share it with others. And it's that place where the flywheel of love gets engaged, because the more love you give from a genuine place, the more that others will give back to you because they literally feel like they have more love to give, particularly if they have't achieved that wonderful place of abundance. A place that I know both of us deserve to get to, especially now that we're on the same page about the path there.
With enough love to share,
Kindness