"How in the hell you gonna love somebody else?"

What is something that you hate the most about yourself?

I ask myself this question a lot when it comes to... well anything.
The thing is, most of the time, I cannot point out one thing about myself that I hate the most. I look at my problems as a whole; simply because they make up who I am. I don't just hate one thing about myself, I hate most everything about myself underneath it all. My bit of confidence that I show in every day life is definitely not exactly what I am feeling. There is a part of me that feels confident and willing to move on with the next problem that life throws at me, but overall, my problems seem to consume me.

The possibility that there is always something better than me out there for people to deal with bothers me in particular. Feeling like my relationships are always going to fail simply because I cannot love myself makes things exhausting. I try to push these thoughts away most of the time, because I prefer not to even acknowledge that they are even there. Sometimes I feel they are only the dark voices in my head trying to haunt me again, but at the same time, I still believe them.

How can you love someone else when you cannot love yourself?

This particular saying bothers me too. Only because I strongly disagree with it. Ever since I was younger, I have hated who I was and most things about me. Because of the way I was raised and the amount of verbal abuse, I feel like I developed a different person; my negative side.

I have always been the type of person to live for other people. It's how things have always been put out to me. My mom always told me that I could not be who I wanted to be, so how was I supposed to get myself away from the mindset that I was never going to be good enough. Though this motivated me for a long time to keep going, it has come back to bite me in the ass in the end. I don't know how to love myself, but I know how to love other people.

I guess you could say that I do love myself but only to a certain extent. But loving other people was the only reason that I wanted to keep going. I wanted to find someone who was going to make me forget about those things. I wanted someone to make me love myself more and to hold me whenever things got bad. But I guess that's tough shit for me. Life itself showed me that that's not how things work around here.

“If you don't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
― RuPaul

As I quote RuPaul here, I question this more than most people do. Aside from the self-confidence and uplifting vibes of this quote, I question what it actually means. Other than just being a quote to help people become more confident in who they are, what does it actually mean?

It makes me wonder how in the hell I am going to love myself before other people.

I have tried for many years to help myself and to become more self confident but I find little success. The more I work on being who I am and loving who I am, the more I hate myself. At the end of the day when I am laying in the bed, who in the hell do I love? What is loving yourself, exactly? Because I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe this is just a teenage hormone thing like they all say but damn does it get exhausting trying to love yourself and your darkest thoughts come back to knock you back under the waves again.
Simple little things make me so insecure and make me second guess everything I have ever done. Little things that shouldn't even bother someone bother me. I can't help but question myself. I can't suffer another fall to my face again. As much as I want to just reassure myself by popping another pill or smoking another blunt, I know that these things are only temporary. I don't put my reliance on these kinds of things, but the high I get from things is just as temporary as this depression that I constantly fight. These feelings are just temporary. Because life will eventually tell me where I am supposed to be. I will eventually find myself when I am older and able to help myself more than I am now.

But the biggest question I can ask myself at this point is
how fucking temporary are these feelings?