Wishing to be held

[You wouldn't know it by reading this post, but it's actually about how happy and reassured I was by a story I managed to write earlier in the day. Seriously the story is one of my favorites and gave me a lot of confidence about the possibility of a fiction writing career]

I feel that the biggest themes in my life revolve around a few key points, self-confidence, self-love, and self-respect. I would say that self-reliance would be there, but in the end I feel that with the others it becomes a moot point. I also believe it takes more courage to allow other people to help you. In short, I find self-reliance to be rather depressing, though I'm more than open to discussion on the point.

Loving oneself really is a huge part of the key to happiness in life to me. If you are not happy with a part of yourself or hate something about yourself you truly have the power to change whatever it is you wish, and without being satisfied with oneself, one cannot be satisfied with others and will constantly live in doubt and confusion. There is also an acute difference between loving oneself and having a crush on oneself. I find that a lot of people who would claim to love themselves are simply selfish, and self-centered, using and abusing other people on the grounds that it is good for themselves. I refer to this as having a crush on oneself because like crushes it seems largely childish and lacks meaning.

Self-respect is one of those funny things which though I would like to say I have, I often doubt. To me self-respect is something which truly nobody else can ever understand, and those who try to make a claim at the amount you have are ignorant. I have often been told by friends that I need more self-respect, that I've gotta have some self-respect, that I've gotta start respecting myself, all the same sentence just re-hashed for purposes of showing how often I hear it. These things are often said after something particularly dick happens to me and I just shrug my shoulders. In my mind I have plenty of self-respect, and I have respect enough for myself to know how to take that which does not matter and truly let it slide (Fight Club, I find myself quoting from movies quite frequently in life, don't hate me). To me self-respect has a lot to do with having faith in yourself enough to weather minor slights for that which you love. It can be argued that one needs self-respect in order to respect and love others, but until you actually love, and you actually sacrifice, you won't know how much of yourself your own pride you will sacrifice when it comes down to it, and your supposed self-respect is equal to the courage held in shouts of bravery and in truth bravado from those who have never feared.

When I cut everything else away though, I always come back to self-confidence. Self-confidence is the trait which I find most attractive in the people I'm around. Nothing will ever give me the joy or sense of accomplishment as helping someone to be confident in themselves, and nothing ever makes me feel quite so enlightened or fulfilled as discovering a confidence in myself. Without a faith in oneself, a person becomes devoid of convicted action. I spoke of confusion and fear when I talked about a lack of self-love, but truly these traits are exhibited even more when a person lacks in confidence. Without a faith in ourselves it becomes rather hard to love ourselves or respect ourselves.

I will readily admit that I have confidence issues, I seek constant reassurance from my own accomplishments and those around me, and always have done. I don't know if this is a problem, certainly it has caused a number of problems in my life recently. In reality I don't know what is a problem nowadays, I tend to think that all things are just natural and there are no perversions, we each exist rather precisely in the manners which we do and where problems arise there is the opportunity for solution. I'll finish with two quotes from Richard Bach:

"Argue for your limitations and sure enough they're yours"
"Each problem comes to us with a gift in its hands"