There is only one of you. You are a precious, unrepeatable expression of the mind of God. It is confoundingly simple to say that there will never be another you, but there won't. There is no one else who sees the world exactly like you do, whose feelings strike the strings of their heart exactly the same way as yours. There is no one, no matter how similar or familiar, whose days and years will be exactly like yours, no one else who can perfectly nurture your dreams, who can most deeply feel each of your hopes as they fly like small butterflies into your heart or are crushed in the palm of a stranger.
Even if we all have thousands of lifetimes — and many people believe we do — the person you are in each of those lives is not this you, with this birth, these eyes and these hands and this pain to work out, these parents, these brothers and sisters, these talents, these gifts to give, this precise number of days and minutes and hours between the writing of your name on your birth certificate and its carving on your tombstone.
You're the only one who has the exceptional opportunity to truly know you and to discover your single beautiful path. Others can hold a mirror for you and show you parts of yourself that may have been obscured for a long time, but they can never give you the whole of yourself, the whole you that is yours to possess, to expend, to express, to release when your day in this life is through.
You can love others, care for them, encourage them, support them, listen to them, comfort them, joke and argue and cry with them — and I hope you do — but all the gifts of joy and consideration and nurturing that you give to others, you also deserve from yourself. You need the love that only you can give you.
— Daphne Rose Kingma, Loving Yourself