Being able to love yourself can change everything around you.

I was talking with my mother over the phone the other day. I called her because I needed to talk to her about something, but she wasn’t listening to me. She said: “well, let’s talk about your next visit. When are you coming back to Japan next time? There’s a lovely café, and a hotel, and a restaurant I want to take you. I am free on Sundays, Mondays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. So keep these dates free for me!”… I thought, well, that’s almost everyday she’s free! But come to think about it, when I’m in Japan I work all the time and I have very little time to spend with my mother, and I thought I should spare more time for her. And at the same time I realised having this kind of conversation would have been completely impossible a few years ago.

It’s been ten years since I moved to the UK. At that time, I was convinced I was worthless and the world would be better off without me. I also suffered from eating disorder. I always thought my family would be happy if I didn’t exist. This thought may have driven me out of Japan and made me move to the UK.

So much has happened during this ten years’ time. But the person who has changed more than anybody is my mother, who is the closest person to me. She is the person who loves me the most, and who understands me the best. She is also my best friend.

But it was a different story when I was living with her in Japan. We had a difficult relationship. We always argued and I often cried why we can’t understand each other.

All I wanted was to be accepted by her, and I wanted her to tell me I don’t have to disappear. I wanted to be loved by her so, so much. But I couldn’t feel I was loved by her, and I felt like I was living in the hell.

When I moved to the UK, I was awaken to realise my true self. I understood myself, and I learned to love myself without condition. Then my family started to change. I started to feel I was valued. My mother is always looking forward to seeing me back in Japan now. It isn’t that I was not loved by my mother and my family before. It is only that I was not aware that I was loved.

How much ever other people love you, if you don’t love yourself, you won’t be able to accept that you are loved. You won’t even be able to realise that you are loved. On the contrary, you often think other people hate you. You will be sucked into the world built around this delusion and you feel things around you become worse and worse.

Most of us are not able to view the reality as they are. One of the reasons is because we project what’s inside of us onto the people around you. When you want to change your life, most people put so much effort into changing people and things around them. But if you truly want a change, it is perhaps quicker to learn to love yourself. Because when you love yourself, you will find that your surroundings will treat you gently and you will find the world is a good place to live.

On the other hand, if you don’t love yourself and do not accept yourself, everything will appear to be against you. So why don’t you think about loving yourself. If you do, then you will find that other people change and your life will change for the better.