In September 2017, BTS launched their new album series titled Love Yourself. This series was dedicated to telling the story of the process of loving yourself. It all starts with the euphoric feeling of loving someone else, to the loneliness you feel when they leave, and ends with the realization that you are the only person that matters the most in your life.
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For the majority of my life, I hated myself.
I was so scared of what people thought of me, so I conceded into their idea of who they thought I was. They thought I was smart, so that’s who I became. I realized I did most things for other people. Why did I take Calculus BC? Because that’s what everyone expected me to do. Why did I try so hard to be valedictorian? Because that’s what everyone expected me to be. I neglected to do things I wanted to do in order to uphold this image of what people painted me to be. I hated myself for doing things because of other people’s expectation of me.
For my whole life, I lived to make other people happy, but that never made me happy.
Then college came around. I was finally free to change who I was. Coincidentally, this is when BTS released Love Yourself: Her, the first installment of the Love Yourself series. During this time of my life, I wanted to branch out and do things that I’ve always wanted to do but was too afraid because it seemed out-of-line with my character. That album made me comfortable with doing more things that I wanted to, instead of worrying about what others thought about it. Then came the next album, Love Yourself: Tear. During this time, I was worrying if I was good enough to do the things I wanted to do. That album made me believe I can excel at what I wanted to do. To conclude the series, they dropped Love Yourself: Answer. During this time, I was worried about what will happen in the future because of the decision I made. Despite my worries about how things will turn out in the future, this album made me content with how things will turn out.
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These albums comforted me by showing me that it is okay to be the person who I want to be. Most importantly, it made me realize that I should I love myself enough to allow myself to be happy.
The Love Yourself series reflected all the things I was struggling with. It was hard to find value in myself and to think of myself as someone worthy of happiness. There were so many moments in my life where I felt alone trying to battle this feeling of self-hatred. When BTS came out with this Love Yourself series, I finally felt like somebody understood me. BTS gave me a reason to love myself.
Of course, I’m still learning to love myself, but lately, more often than not, I have this overwhelming feeling of love for who I am and the person I’m trying to be.
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