Don’t Play Yourself!

When giving people advice on finding love, gaining confidence, or just enjoying life, one of the most popular pieces of advice offered is that you have to love and be happy with yourself. Loving yourself is comprised of having a positive self-image and accepting the things about yourself that you can’t change. When you love yourself it doesn’t necessarily mean that you think you are perfect and therefore don’t need to strive to become better. It just means that you are aware of your value and you know that you have things to offer. It means that though you may strive to change some things about yourself in an effort to make improvements, you still accept and appreciate who you are inside and out.

Why is it so important to love yourself? It’s important because your view of yourself has an enormous impact on your view of the world. When you don’t see yourself properly, when you don’t see the beauty in yourself and all of the gifts that you have to offer, you often won’t be able to see the beauty in the world around you. When you don’t have a clear view of the world, it can lead you to make bad decisions – decisions that aren’t fully based in reality because they are skewed by your somewhat unrealistic/negative view of the world.

Lil Kim is a prime example of what having a negative self-image can do to a person. She didn’t think that she was beautiful, so she tried to change the way she looked. She has gone through several transformations, so it seems that no matter how much she changes her physical appearance, she fails to achieve the look that she wants. Lil Kim went from being a beautiful young woman to a caricature that people laugh at all because her decisions were skewed by a negative self-image. She played herself, and will continue to do so until she learns to love herself.

The whole idea of loving yourself in order to find happiness may seem somewhat idealistic to some, but it really is a necessity. A lot of people make the mistake of searching for someone or something outside of themselves to make them happy, but that happiness is fleeting because it is only there for as long as that exterior factor is around. When you love and are happy with yourself, your happiness isn’t dependent upon outside factors. That means that you can be happy no matter what your situation may be. When you don’t have that, you often end up settling for less than you deserve, making poor relationship decisions, or even worse, harming yourself physically. All of those things fall into the same category as Lil Kim and all her plastic surgery – playing yourself. Don’t play yourself. Love yourself.

-Tiffany Vicks