Sometimes the hardest person to love is yourself.
Who knows you better than you? Okay, with the possible exception of God Almighty. 
Unlike the rest of the world, we remember all of the failures, the promises we made but never kept, and the goals we never attained. We relive in our minds the lost loves, the harsh words of friends and relatives, and those moments when everything seemed stacked against us.
It’s a big gooey self-hate sandwich.
I wonder if they serve them at Del Taco? You know they do have hamburgers there too. =-)
Back to the topic at hand.
In my travels I’ve learned that one of the most difficult things in life is forgiveness. And I’m not talking about forgiving friends and loved ones. That’s a little easier. It’s forgiving ourselves for not living up to our potential.
And that brings us to loving ourselves.
I’m not saying we should love ourselves for no good reason. I always think of the Saturday Night Live skit where the actor looks in the mirror and says, “You’re good enough, you’re smart enough, and gosh darn it people like you.”
That’s not what I’m talking about. Although it still makes smile to think about it.
The mirror we stare into is the reflection of our past. And it’s easy to dislike ourselves for those failures. But as we invest energy into those thoughts we simultaneously rekindle the past and teleport it into the present. I don’t want us to forget the past, since there are lessons to be learned from it, but to relive the past is self-destructive.
And yet so many of us do that every day.
In resurrecting the past we forget there is a future. And in that future lives the person you will become. That person hasn’t repeated the mistakes of the past. They have a clean slate, but only if we can forgive ourselves for the mistakes and then love ourselves for the things to come.