Nikki G Payne

I've been through a lot of stuff lately personally. What I realized was that I was having a hard time loving myself and realizing that other people love me. It's an affirmation for me. I often get down or when I feel less than – I have to remind myself that people love me, I am loved and I love myself. 'Cause I can't accept other people's love if I don't love myself. I think a lot of people think if you have things or you got money or you are at a certain place in life, they automatically assume that you love yourself and you know other people love you, but sometimes you lose touch with that. So that's important to me, especially right now. C: Do you feel comfortable sharing more of the story of what it took for you to get there? Depends on how much is going to get out. I've gone through a little bit of addiction recovery lately and you know when you go through something like that, you tend to have a lot of self hate. And that's – you hate yourself. And I really had to learn to re-love myself. C: What was the turning point for you? I think one day I was talking to somebody or reading something and it basically said 'If you can't love yourself, then you can't accept God's love' right? And you also can't accept anybody else's love. And you can't love anybody else. And I first had to realize, I had to start – it was a few weeks ago – I literally had to face the fact that I was lacking a lot of self love. And some days I see it, I don't believe it. But the more I talk to myself, I look at both sides of the coin. I don't just look at the bad things I've done, I look at – I've done a lot of good things as well. And I'm able to love myself. And that enables me to accept God's love and it enables me to accept my wife's love and the love of my friends and family too. I don't know if it was just a magical moment, you know, like a Disney movie. But the light kinda clicked on. You esteem yourself on other stuff. People esteem themselves on money and cars and clothes and, you know, whatever. And then you wake up and you realize you can't esteem yourself with other stuff, you have to have self-esteem, you have to have self love. Other love isn't valuable if you can't love yourself... you need to know you're whole and you're complete. If you never have a dollar, you're enough just who you are. No matter what you got, no matter what people think you are. And it's because you're loved that you have all these things... it's not the other way around. People think 'if I have all this stuff and I build all this shit around me, then I'm loved.' It's not that way. It's 'I'm loved, and because of that I have things. I'm blessed with things.' And even if I'm not blessed with material shit, I'm still loved.