The hardest thing about loving ourselves is that we’re letting so many people have the power to give us reasons not to.

So many times we’ve given other people the ability to make us feel not quite good enough and we’ve ultimately led to our own downfall, even if we try blaming others.

But what if we took that control back? What if suddenly the power we thought other people had to make us feel wanted and valued actually belonged with us, we wouldn’t lose sleep over how we were impacting others because all we would be focusing on is how we’re impacting our own lives.

We all still seem to be healing from an almost relationship, a friend with benefits, a three night stand, or a summer fling. We keep searching for closure and looking for answers from the person that broke our hearts, when really we gave it to them before they even deserved it. A lot of us are struggling to move on from an old love like we were dumped, even though we were never given the label of boyfriend or girlfriend.

So what are we actually struggling to move on from? Because an almost relationship isn’t worth getting heart broken over and it definitely isn’t worth losing your sense of calm.

A very wise person in my life said something to me recently which has resonated:

“It’s bad enough that people we spend years with have an impact on our lives, but letting somebody I’ve known for less time then I’ve owned a toothbrush affect me, that’s not ok”

How many of us have been on dates that result in that person choosing not to reply to your messages, but will stalk your social media? All of a sudden it seems to affect your head way more than it should do, why has someone who’s relatively a stranger suddenly got the ability to control your state of mind? Let’s be honest, a month from now you probably won’t even remember their name anyway.

Or even that person you’ve been “dating” for a month or so, it was never official so you shouldn’t really have invested that much of your mental energy into it. But yet here you are wondering if you should message them, hoping they’re bothered by that picture you uploaded with another guy etc etc …. ultimately the only person who’s thinking about it loads, is you.

We spend hours deciphering texts, ranting to friends and over thinking message responses over someone who just doesn’t care. They’ve never introduced you to their grandparents or bothered to learn when your birthday is or in some cases even bothered to make plans with you more than once. So what’s the big deal?

If you take a second to sit back and think about it, it seems as though we’ve stopped entering serious relationships, but we haven’t stopped getting our hearts broken, or at the absolute minimum, we haven’t stopped letting it having a serious affect on the way we think about ourselves. It seems a shame that we’re letting others around us control our energy that much.

And on that note, I think we all need to try and focus more on our own actions and how they impact our moods rather than focusing on how other people are making us feel. Especially people who ultimately end up playing a very unimportant role in the story of our lives, people who are fleeting and unimportant, people who ten years from now when you recall the most memorable and important events of your life ….. won’t even make the top 100 things to reminisce about.