The One Friendship You’re Missing Is Your Own

We’ve all been there, surrounded by people but feeling more alone than ever. 

Usually you can never pin point why, and it just fills you with this sinking, empty feeling that won’t go away. What’s wrong with you that you can’t be like everyone else around you? 

Recently, I finally figured out why. 

Friendship was so important to me. I probably defined too much of my personal success on the amount and quality of friendships I had. Much like my late blooming into self love and appreciation, I was giving so much that I honestly didn’t have to the people around me. I realized, once I lost a lot of friendships, that the one friendship I needed the most, I had given no time to. 

My own. 

It’s sort of like the realization you have after a toxic relationship. The one where you know you needed a slap in the face a long time ago, but now it’s too late and you have to pick up the pieces someone else left behind and try to make yourself whole again. 

The relationship you have with yourself is so crucial to true, never-ending happiness. We rely on others way too much to give us the feeling that we need to be giving ourselves. You should always be your first priority, but we rarely have that perspective until it’s too late. 

Growing up, it’s all about social situations. How to act, how to speak, how to develop relationships. But when are we supposed to learn about growing our internal relationship with ourselves? 

You can’t give what you don’t have, but we do. That’s why the world is filled with so many broken people. Marriages fail, families split apart, and friendships end so prematurely because we are looking to other broken people to fix us. We glue ourselves together with smiles and affirmations that aren’t sincere and then lay awake wondering why we don’t feel fulfilled.

You HAVE to develop a friendship with yourself. You have to put yourself first. My great aunt tells me all the time – “If you’re happy, that’s all that matters.” and I shrug it off because we hear that ALL the time, but we don’t actually listen to it. If you aren’t happy, well then, what honestly does matter? What you have in your closet? What contacts you have in your phone? It hasn’t worked up until this point, so how is adding more going to?

You are going to come to the end of your life and you aren’t going to measure it’s value in the amount of friends you had, how many people you made happy, and how many times you sacrificed your own emotional well being to keep the peace. You need to look back knowing you lived the way you wanted to. You want to look back knowing you were happy no matter what the outside circumstances called for. This is something we learn to late in life, and being in my 20s, I don’t want to ‘eventually’ not care what people think, I want to start taking away the value I have in everyone else’s opinion and invest it back into my own. 

You have to be a friend to yourself first and you have to be happy on your own to ever be happy with someone else. Stop giving up what you don’t even have. That emptiness you feel is your calling to start loving yourself before loving others. You’ll see your life improve tremendously and not because of any outside factors, but because you did something most people do later in life. You took the time to love the only one that matters. YOU. And you took the time to genuinely make yourself happy on your own. 

You can’t give someone who is thirsty a drink from a glass that’s empty, so you can’t give others love without self-love first. Learn that now, so that you can start radiating the love you’re trying so desperately to give others now.