When it comes down to life decisions a common phrase is to put yourself first. Well, I beg to differ.

Everything I do, every decision I make is with the conscious thought of the people around me, mainly those that love me. I’m a people pleaser, I admit I feed off the acceptance and recognition of others. Many probably think this sounds pathetic, but here me out first.

We are told to love ourselves before anyone else, that we are incapable of loving another before first, loving ourselves. I think this is wrong. I think it is completely the other way around. How can we be put on the spot like that and just pick things of ourselves to love? We are who we are, and we’ve been that person for so long, how could we possibly know what is to love about ourselves? But it is so easy to fall in love with the people around us, and almost easier to consider loving something about ourselves once someone else has shown their love for it first.“I often feel that our greatest individual challenge is to close the gap between our unflattering self-concepts and the truth of our magnificence. To see ourselves through the eyes of those who love us,” author Jeff Brown says in his novel, Ascending with Both Feet on the Ground: Words to Awaken your Heart. Just as Brown says, in order to see the truth of our own magnificence we need to see it as an outsider would, the ones that love us.

We are told to make decisions for our own self-interest, but I again beg to differ. We all have at least one personwe know genuinely cares for us. Whether it be a parent, a sibling, a teacher, a friend, a partner, or even a pet, just think of that one person now. They want you to succeed in life, they want you to be happy, they think about your self-interest. Now, if you live completely in the direction of that one person, are you not still living for yourself? Maybe you do not decide to go to university because you think it is what’s best for you, maybe you decide to go to university because it will make that person proud. That pride comes from their hope that you do what is best for yourself, so is it not the same thing? Maybe even better. This person is your motivation, they are a reason to keep at it, they are the recognition at the end of the day that makes you feel like you are on top of the world.

In an Huffington Post article titled “How to put yourself first” by writer, Emily Williams,she says “I’m not saying that you shouldn’t take care of your friends, your partner or your children, but what about you? Aren’t you just as important? (Maybe even more so!)” But are we really more important than the people around us? We would not be who we are today without them, we would not have something to live for without them, we would not have so many happy memories without them. So how can we be any better than them, if we could not survive without them? I argue, our loved ones are more important.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying do everything this person says, especially if they are manipulating you and do not truly care for you as the way I speak of. The act of ignorance and of being gullible can with tract everything I speak of here. But otherwise, living for the people that truly care about you in the end is living for yourself and beyond. So no, don’t put yourself first, put that certain somebody first because they deserve it.