Love yourself. Your first love, your first relationship is with you!

Authored by Natasha Fernandes, AVP – Legal, IN10 Media Network

On woman's day, usually, most articles celebrate womanhood, woman liberation, breaking of the glass ceiling and similar topics. However, I would like to touch upon a topic that is not gender bound but impacts everyone's life - acceptance, expectation and/or wanting to be loved.

Every individual yearns for love and acceptance, being appreciated, cared for, and wanted; and we always look for it outside. However, one forgets that what we are searching for outside is actually within ourselves. Our first relationship is with ourselves, our body and our soul.

Loving oneself means caring for yourself, appreciating yourself and most importantly accepting yourself the way you are and celebrating it! We need to give ourselves time to do what we want to do, following our passion, and our dream.

Needless to say, this love has to be selfless, not selfish. Loving oneself doesn't mean putting oneself above others or demeaning others while praising yourself and at the same time, it doesn't mean allowing others to put you down, treat you badly, or make yourself available as they need. Life is all about learning to create a harmonious balance.

No person can let you down except you.

Running away from yourself, forgetting your responsibility or drowning in that sorrow is not the solution. We have to learn to put our lives, hopes, aspirations, and passion above people that don't care. Rather, be that amazing person and love yourself and remember the ones that love you for who you are. Failures in life are lessons wherein we need to understand and analyse where the fault lies to not repeat it again.

Difficult doing, easy saying and most difficult living.. but the day we succeed in doing this, our lives will be beautiful and successful (in your own terms) because acceptance and the love we are searching for outside, we will find within.