Blog 1 – This I Believe… I believe in love – By: Ariana Hernandez

Love, to me, is not only something shared in a relationship between you and another person. Love can also be shared between you and yourself. It can even be shared between you and a thing or activity. It took me a long time to come up with my own personal definition of love and I developed it a little less than a year ago.

I was at a pretty hard time in my life and I felt like I didn’t even know myself. I also felt like I didn’t know anyone else… not even people I was already close with. I was not happy with how I saw myself, how I was treating people, and how others were treating me. In my mind, I felt pretty much alone. I decided to cut some ties with people that were not positively influencing my life. I came to realize I had cut off pretty much every one of my college friends at that point. Thinking back, it’s almost as if those negative people were heavy anchors holding back my ship from sailing forward into a better future. For a short period of time, I was not happy and didn’t know how to practically start over.

So, I decided to try and get back into doing something that I loved: living a healthy and balanced lifestyle by exercising and eating the right food for my mind and body. By spending most of my time by myself and putting all of my energy into something that was for me and only me, I actually felt really good about myself. I was beginning to get to know who I actually was for the first time. There was nobody judging me for my actions, nobody there to tell me how or what to think, and nobody forcing me to be something I wasn’t. 

As we all know, people change every couple of years. I was at a point in my life where I was so lost in always being surrounded by too many people for too many years and never having time for myself that I just did not know who I was anymore (emphasis on “I”). But, after starting over with my new lifestyle and focusing on something that I loved, I found who I genuinely was as a person. Once that happened, my eyes began to open. They were opening up to the fact that I needed to love myself before I could love anyone or anything in my life.

Now that I knew me for me and actually liked who I was on the inside and out, it was time for me to share the love that developed inside of me with my friends, family, acquaintances, and even strangers. By spreading the love I had built up inside of me, I was able to be kind to people. I was always a kind person, but over the last year or two, it was not always genuine. But, now that I just had a natural feeling of love within me, it was easier to not even think about being nicer to others. It came out naturally. I also found that I was more outgoing and made friends a lot easier. Soon, I found others like me (same interests, same priorities, etc.). I was no longer by myself. I talk to more people now than I ever have.

Obviously, the word love can mean so many different things to every person. But, for me, love is not only something I share, but it’s something I find. Love is something I give and hope to receive. It is in many different places, people, things, and activities. But, overall, the moral of my post is this: Love is something we revolve around and something that will never go away. But, just know, it’s easier to give and receive it if you love yourself first. Find that thing, that activity, that place that makes you happy and makes you love you for you. Then, genuine love between you and others will just appear in your life without any struggle.

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