Midlife Crisis Queen: The Weblog

Unfortunately, self-love and self-respect don’t come naturally for most of us. We learn how to value ourselves according to how we have been treated. If our parents were young, inexperienced, or under a lot of stress, we may have been seen mostly as yet another problem for them, and everyone else we came in contact with as a child. This means that most of us struggle with self-love and self-respect issues as adults.

If you do not learn how to value yourself, you will find that you cannot fully value others in your life, and others will find it difficult to value you.

However, this does not mean that you should give up. You have the power to re-discover yourself in all of your beauty and glory in any moment of your life. That is the challenge and adventure of midlife. Who am I now? What do I love to do? What makes me feel completely alive?

If you haven’t asked yourself these questions lately, it’s high time! Regardless of all that has happened to you, and regardless of how difficult your life seems right now, you are only a loser if you give up on experiencing the value of you. Others may have given up on you, but you have the final say on what your life is worth. So, what do you say?

Try to discover what is uniquely exciting and lovable in you. Focus all of your energy on yourself for a change, write about your changing feelings about yourself, and try everything you’ve ever really wanted to try, but didn’t think you were worthy of.

Perhaps there is an artist inside of you dying to emerge. Perhaps you could really enjoy a certain sport you’ve never tried, but have thought about. Buy some watercolors on a complete whim or go for a long walk or bike ride today. Instead of sitting alone dwelling on your own misfortune, get outside and gather some vitamin D!

Try taking all of the energy you’ve put into either feeling sorry for yourself or manipulating others, and now put it into valuing and loving yourself. Given a chance, you might find you actually enjoy spending time with yourself. You just may be a pretty fun person to be with!

You see, this isn’t really a “why” question, at all. It’s a “when” and “how” question! Why you feel the way you do about yourself at this moment in time is irrelevant. How you are going to transform yourself into someone you honestly value and enjoy spending time with, and then begin spending quality time with, there’s your personal challenge!!!

You get what you are in your relationships with others, so spend some time thinking about what you can contribute to someone else’s quality of life. Then contribute that to your own!

Try building up such a large and healthy supply of self-esteem and self-respect, that you know for certain that you will never accept any type of abuse or disrespect from anyone ever again.

Now that is the positive power of self-love!