No One Outside of Yourself Can Be Your Reason for Living

“You are the reason I live.”

Erasure, Reason (2014)

I hate to disagree with Erasure. They’ve been one of my favorite bands since the 1980s. But NO ONE can be the reason why I live, aside from myself and God. No other person outside of ourselves can truly be the reason why any of us live. If we find ourselves feeling that way it’s a big red flag. And that big red flag is trying to tell us that we are doing a poor job of loving ourselves.

The only reason we ever feel like we can’t live without someone else is poor self-love. When we are in that state of poorly taking care of our own wants and needs, we will feel very empty inside. We will have an aching inner-neediness that drives us to be obsessed with ending that horrible, desperate feeling by attaching ourselves to someone else.

The problem is when we are desperately trying to attach to someone else in order to feel better, we are like leeches sucking the blood or life out of the other person. And deep down we know it. We know that we are feeling a dire compulsion to call, drop by or see the person too much. And yet many of us can’t seem to cope with this dire need. We give into it without ever challenging it or trying to understand what’s really going on within us.

Whenever I feel the desperate need to be texting, calling on seeing someone too much, I stop, breathe deeply and say “This is about me. This isn’t about the other person. He/she cannot be my savior. They aren’t responsible for making me feel better about me, I AM.”

As much as I hate it, I know that I am feeling desperately needy because I am doing a poor job of loving me in that moment. So I regain my sanity and my emotional balance by realizing that I need to turn it all over to my Higher Power and decide what it is I’m failing to do in terms of loving me better.

I then let my friends and loved ones off the hook. As I regain my inner-balance, the compulsion to have someone else rescue me lessens and fades away. I regain my serenity and my head regains its clarity.

There’s a big difference between loving the people in our lives and believing that they are the reason why we live. Sure, we will love some people to the max and when we lose them, say to death or to the end of a relationship, we will miss them. But we won’t die once they are gone. We are stronger than that. We will live on and we will be happy even when we are missing them at times.

Any time we feel like we can’t live without someone, or like that someone is the only reason we have to live, we are in a delusional state of mind. To get out of that delusion, and the desperate needy feelings that are fueling it, we have to turn to our Higher Power and ask for the ability to love ourselves better. Our Higher Power will then reveal to us all the ways in which we need to be taking better care of ourselves. We then have to take responsibility for our own lives and happiness by doing whatever we need to do to love ourselves more completely into being happy, healthy people.