I consider myself to be a self-love advocate, someone who always stresses the importance of loving yourself first before anything else can fall into place. I do my very best to exhibit self-love and to help others achieve that state of being. Though, it hasn’t always been rainbows and butterflies. Learning to love yourself is an ongoing process that truly takes time, effort, dedication, and perseverance; just like any task does. But I promise you that a little work on yourself, goes a long way. Here’s ten things that begin to happen once you learn to love yourself.

1. You stop caring what people think

Loving yourself means that you are at peace with every part of yourself (even your flaws.) It means being conscious of all your worst qualities and mistakes, but knowing you're awesome anyway. Therefore, when people don’t like you, it doesn’t matter, and they don’t really matter either. Half of the time people judge you for things that aren’t even true in the first place – so "lol" jokes actually on them. And for the things that may be true, it’s still none of their business and their opinions are irrelevant. You know the truth and more importantly, you know your mistakes don’t define you. Those sucky people who do judge you for your mistakes aren’t worth your time anyways. All that matters is what you think of yourself, because at the end of the day, you only ever really have yourself.

2. You suddenly enjoy being alone – and need your alone time

I used to hate being alone. I would get involved with as many things as I could just to ensure that I would be busy and never have a free second to myself. I constantly surrounded myself with people, even people who I knew didn’t actually care about me, just so I wouldn’t be alone. Being alone made me think too much, made me sad, and made me question the person I was. But one day I decided to make a change and forced myself to get used to being alone. I thought a lot, cried a lot, and wanted to give up a lot. But one day it hit me that I had way too good of a life to not enjoy every aspect of it – including enjoying and loving myself. I now love having time to myself; time to clear my head, time to relax, time to actually enjoy my own company. Not that I don’t love hanging with my friends, but sometimes all a girl needs is herself.

3. Having a boyfriend becomes irrelevant

Ever since junior high my life had been tied together by a string of boyfriend, after boyfriend. Regardless if they were serious relationships or not, I was always receiving attention from a boy, one way or another. I think I just enjoyed the attention and the feeling of being wanted. Yet, here I am now, 21 years old and the absolute last thing in the world I want right now is a boyfriend. I’m dedicating my early twenties to myself – to finding myself, to loving myself. We have our whole lives to be married and share our lives with someone. This is the time to be selfish – the time to travel the world, make irrational decisions, be spontaneous, finish your bucket list, and start that blog you’ve been meaning to for the past three years. There’s always the possibility you can fall in love, but only you have the power to make the decision to love yourself first.

4. You eliminate the negative people out of your life

Like I said, learning to love yourself is one hell of a process, an emotional and messy one at that. And through that transition, you begin to really see who matters and who doesn’t. The people who encourage you, support your decisions and are proud of you, are the only people that belong in your life. The people who answer their phones at 3 a.m. just to stay on the phone with you while you fall asleep, the people who buy you ice-cream when you’re having a bad day, the people who stick up for you even when they know you’re wrong, and the people that are just plainly good people. There are so many things in this world that are mediocre – your friendships should not be one of them.

5. You learn to love others better

Now that you love yourself, you spend so much less time analyzing yourself or wondering why other people love you (because you’re awesome, duh) and you suddenly have all this free time to show them how much you love them! You realize how important it is to remind the people in your life just how wonderful they are and show how much you care. You learn how to love, how to be a best friend, and how to express yourself better. You see past all the little things and focus on what’s important – which is obviously overusing “I love you.”

6. You stop stressing about the little things

Being in college simply means being stressed. I’m not suggesting that loving yourself means you’ll never be nervous for an interview or panic about your 10 page paper that’s due tomorrow. But loving yourself comes with a sense of hope and feeling of reassurance that everything will always be okay in the end. It’s a reminder that no matter what, you’ll always have yourself, and that that’s enough. It’s something to hold on to when you feel like everything else is going wrong or moving way too fast. Being able to depend on yourself and trust yourself really does wonders in attempting to stay sane in this crazy world.

7. You become unbelievably thankful for your parents

You start to wonder how the hell your parents were able to craft you into the person you are today, and you become unbelievably thankful. You start to think of all the countless number of things they have done for you over the years and the valuable things they have taught you. You realize that without them, you would not be you. Your relationship with them becomes much more important to you and you begin to recognize and appreciate all the sacrifices they have made just to make sure you were happy. And that right there is a good enough reason in its self to be happy with yourself, to love yourself; because your parents say so, and your parents are always right.

8. You let go of your regrets

Loving yourself means loving every aspect of yourself – even the not so good parts. It’s letting go of your past in hope of your future. It’s trusting that everything happens for a reason and your mistakes are merely lessons learned. Life is too short to spend time regretting the things who made you who you are. So learn to love your mistakes and use them as a constant reminder of how far you have come. Hold them near to your heart and be thankful for the opportunity to change, to grow, to learn.

9. You develop a new-found confidence

Throughout high school I often struggled with my self-esteem and was always very critical of myself. I looked to others to give me the reassurance I needed and wouldn’t dare say anything positive about myself out loud. Thankfully, those days are gone. Although I still consider myself to be a very humble person, I am not a negative or weak person. I walk with a quiet confidence and an ongoing reminder that I am capable of accomplishing anything I put my mind to. I know I am a good person and I know what I deserve, and I will not settle for anything less of that. Because what's wrong with being confident?

10. Everything starts to make sense

Everything you’ve been second-guessing for the past (who the hell knows how long) finally clicks. It’s like every answer you’ve been searching for and every cloudy thought suddenly becomes clear. Your past now serves a purpose and your future is now visible. You begin to understand why certain things happened and you learn to accept that sometimes life just really doesn’t make sense. You learn to sit at peace with not being able to know the answer to everything or solve every issue. You learn to know that being happy is something that we always have control over, no matter what is happening in our lives. You learn to love the ones you love unconditionally, and to remind them of that religiously, because you know life is way too short. And most importantly, you learn that life is way too short to not love yourself too.