BY JENNIFER JESTER-MADRIGAL

Show me what you think you are, and I’ll show you what you actually are, and then you can decide which version of yourself is the one you wish to portray to the world.

How many of us have had this conversation with ourselves time and time again only to come to the same conclusion each time? I don’t deserve “this” or I don’t deserve “that” because of something I have done, or simply because I am not enough. It’s amazing the power your thoughts can have over your entire life, often drastically altering your own path.

I was lucky in that I grew up in a loving home, with loving parents and great examples of what family, love and friendship look like. My father loved my mother and she loved him, and we were kissed and hugged and smothered with attention as well. We had the suburban upbringing: two kids and a dog – sans the picket fence (ours was a block wall) – and a neighborhood full of friends to play with until the street lights came on and we rushed our dirty hands and tousled hair back to our happy homes.

But somewhere along the transition from jubilant child to responsible adult, I stopped seeing myself as “deserving” of the love I had witnessed growing up. I let my own guilt and apathy for others override my own right to be loved as deeply and sincerely as I once was.

As a woman and a mother I began to believe that everyone else came first, and while I still think this is a great philosophy to live by, it’s not exactly correct. If you put the needs of others in front of your own, you can avoid becoming a selfish person, but there has to be a line drawn at some point. You are in charge of that line, and the power that comes with that is profound.

Loving another does not mean that you do it at the expense of your own soul. If you are a follower of Christ, then any love that takes you away from His path is at the expense of your own soul. Loving another shouldn’t hurt. While there is often emotional pain involved in loving another person, that love should not cause your heart to constantly ache. True love builds you up and makes you a greater version of yourself; it does not tear you down with ugly words and forgotten promises. Loving another means you let them be “themselves” even if that “self” isn’t what you completely understand. The greatest gift you can give another is to allow them to be who they are, and accept them with all their craziness, all their insecurities, and all their unique imperfections.

The strange thing is that when you turn these gifts around and apply them to yourself, you realize that until you can love yourself in this same way, you really can’t truly love another. What we think we deserve – consciously or unconsciously – we accept. It is only when we change our own perceptions and really start loving ourselves in that same selfless way that we can demand the love we know we deserve. Life is too short to settle; so don’t.