Self-love, Helping, and Dreaming

“Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, it’s at the end of your arm. As you get older, remember you have another hand: the first is to help yourself, the second is to help others.” – Audrey Hepburn

“There are some who bring a light so great to the world that even after they have gone, the light remains.” – Unknown

“You should take some responsibility for the way you present yourself. But you should not be hung up on your looks, whether you are ugly or handsome, because it isn’t an achievement.” – Christopher Reeve

Today’s post is kind of a jumble in my mind so I’m not sure how much sense it will make.

First of all, I’m in the final stages of finishing my first novel. Because of that I’ve been thinking a great deal about what will happen after it’s published and out in the world. I’ve been thinking about what will I do if no one buys my book or what will I do if lots of people buy it? What do we do when our dreams come true?

Which brings me to the second thing I’ve been thinking about, helping others. Since I’m older now and have learned a few things, I feel a great desire to be of help to others. But I’ve been thinking, is there ever a time when giving assistance to a person who needs it is not a good idea? And what constitutes help? Are we enabling someone’s addiction to be helpless if we give help over a long period of time?

The third thing I’ve been thinking about which ties the first two things together is self-love. Can we do anything significant with our lives without loving ourselves first?

What precipitated this seemingly disjointed series of thoughts was a conversation I had with someone over the weekend. They wanted me to apologize, again, for something I’d done to hurt another person. And I got to thinking about people who think that happiness and self-love come from outside themselves. In the above mentioned incident, I did apologize. But the person I spoke to thought I needed to continue to apologize over and over again so that the person in question could feel better.

People who require multiple apologies for the same incident are, in my estimation, insecure and lack self-love. I know from experience that on the one hand I was suspicious of assurances from outside and on the other craved attention to bolster my withered sense of self. Someplace deep inside I knew that I was the only one who could choose to do the work to believe in myself. As I began the work toward loving myself, I let go of the need for approval from others. I was able to let go of imagined or real hurts and forgive.

It has taken years of work to fully love myself and now that I do, life is opening up for me in a most profound way. Once I accepted that I was a good person no matter what, I realized that every issue I faced in life lead back to my ability or inability to love myself.

Okay, self-love is good but how does self-love connect to being there for others. I believe that we are best able to help others when we feel secure in knowing who we are and when we know that security doesn’t come from outside ourselves. There are those who help others from an ego perspective. They want to look good so they offer help in order to be seen to be doing good. But how long are they able to maintain their good works? Eventually the ego tells them that they are in a dangerous situation and that they are jeopardizing their own safety and security. Then to save themselves, they stop helping saying that continuing to help will encourage the one being helped to becoming dependent.

Now here’s a curious thing. Sometimes people with poor self-esteem just need a cheerleader, someone who will be there for them without any expectations or demands. It’s amazing how just loving someone can help them heal. The best cheerleaders are those who’ve gone through similar situations as the person they are helping and can say, “See, I did it. So can you.” It’s the same for all of us. Once we’re on our way to loving ourselves our minds are open to creating bigger and more wonderful dreams.

Deepak Chopra says, “If you want to do really important things in life and big things in life, you can’t do anything by yourself. And your best teams are your friends and your siblings.” In other words we all need help from time to time. There is no shame in asking for it, and at some point we’ll all be able to give help where needed.

So to bring this full circle, everyone deserves to love themselves, have their dreams come true and then offer the wisdom they’ve gained along the way to help others. In my opinion everyone is valuable enough to garner help from someone and in turn give it to others.

Feel free to leave a comment.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2015

Facebook
Twitter
Goodreads
LinkedIn