Who is that for you? Is that your parent, your child, your partner? I’d like to think that it is you. You are the most important person in your life. I am the most important person in my life and so it goes on. We are the most important people to ourselves.
Before our minds go into resisting this idea, I need to say here that it makes sense to learn to prioritise ourselves. Treating ourselves as the most important person in our lives is actually choosing kindness and it is better for our families and communities overall.
The whole world is in a mess right now because the majority of people are not doing their job. That job is to look after their own needs, health and wellbeing. Instead we seem to be in a never-ending chase of looking after someone else’s needs.
An unsigned pact
We are trained from a very early age to be kind, caring, selfless, accommodating, supporting and generous to others. These are very useful qualities to nurture in people if we’d like to live in a healthy and safe society. However, we have a problem when we are taught to put others first. It’s drilled into us that others’ needs, desires, interests, preferences come first. We are taught it is right, polite and necessary to look after those around us first and only then look after ourselves. It is a social imperative to be a good person and for you to be a good person means you come last. Any attempts to make yourself the priority are called selfish and may be treated with contempt by others.
This training is necessary to maintain systems such as families, communities, societies. Since we are social animals and we live in groups, we need rules to create and maintain order within these groups. These rules come from similar biological systems such as a pack of wolves, a colony of ants, a swarm of bees, whose survival relies upon individuals serving the collective and where the collective is more important than the individual.
We are enrolled into this process before we could make our own conscious choice. By the time we are able to choose to make ourselves the priority, the training is so deeply ingrained that we put others first automatically.
Who is caring for the carer?
So what have we got? We’ve got a mass of nervous, hurried, exhausted and worn-out people who are in a constant state of servitude to those around them.
Putting others first means bypassing yourself. If you do it long enough, you forget who you are. Ignore yourself for a while and you become deaf and blind to yourself and what’s happening within you. We become disconnected from our inner knowing of ourselves and instead plugged into the system to serve its needs.
If I cannot see myself as the most important person for me and I make everyone else more important than me, what happens to me? Who looks after me?
If most, if not all of my time is dedicated to looking after others, when do I look after myself?
As I said earlier, individuals are less important than the system itself. They are simply a means to an end, serving someone and something else. In a biological system, survival is the main goal so the programme, often unconscious in people, is to give birth and raise children so that they can raise their children in turn and so it goes on.
What about the human? We have got these programmes in us but we are more than just these biological imperatives. Why else have we got consciousness, free will and freedom of choice, if all we are is biological machines being born, reproducing and dying?
Someone else’s job
So we are told we need to look after others first. Why? Who says that other people cannot look after themselves? Why can’t we care for ourselves and teach our children to do that as soon as possible?
Here I am not talking about very small children, the elderly or people with disabilities who do need special attention and care. I’m talking about grown-ups who are fully capable of looking after themselves.
If everyone looked after themselves, we would all be much happier and less stressed. Instead we’re doing someone’s chores and meeting someone’s needs out of obligation and hope that they will do the same for us whilst being completely exhausted and quietly resenting them for it. Is this true love and kindness? Is this true care and connection?
What if we didn’t do it? What if others started looking after themselves? What if we did the job we were supposed to be doing which is caring for ourselves first?
Dissatisfaction
Looking after someone else’s needs and not your own creates a conflict in you. Your whole being says: “Look after me! I’ve got needs that must be addressed. I am important. When you look after others only, you neglect me!”
This creates a very deep crack in your being filled with discontent and frustration. Deep dissatisfaction with our lives happens when through every “selfless” act towards another simply out of duty, you disregard yourself. Moving towards another to meet their needs for them means walking away from yourself. When you make someone else’s wellbeing your priority at your expense, you turn against yourself.
There comes a point in life, when a person feels so out of touch with themselves that all sense and meaning of life is drained out of them. This dissatisfaction is the symptom of the disconnect within the self.
Finding meaning
There is a way out of this hollowed out and meaningless existence of always coming last in your own life. The meaning to life is to live it and to experience it in your unique way, to find and relish in what brings you joy, what inspires you. To find your meaning you need to find yourself. To find yourself you need to decide to make yourself the most important person in your life.
It is much kinder and more sustainable if we look after ourselves first. Choosing yourself is kindness to yourself. It nourishes you, it feeds you, it fills you with love, joy and peace. You can then choose to connect to those around you with this loving energy rather than out of duty and obligation.
When you make a decision to prioritise yourself, to listen to yourself, you can finally hear and feel what is going on inside you. You can pick up subtle changes happening, see what you need and act on it. You are then able to re-establish and deepen your connection with yourself. This way you will be able to create a life that is meaningful to you, a life truly worth living.