This February, join me for a different kind of love story. Seven days exploring how loving yourself first isn’t selfish—it’s how you become capable of the kind of love that changes everything. Because hope begins when you fill your own well.
Love is a force in motion. It builds when it’s shared and transforms everything it touches. But here’s the truth most of us learn too late: love doesn’t arrive from somewhere else. It flows from within.
The Road Home
Leo Buscaglia, the beloved USC professor known as “Dr. Love,” wrote something that cuts right to the heart of the difference between genuine and counterfeit love:
“Find the person who will love you because of your differences and not in spite of them, and you have found a lover for life.”
This is the contrast I couldn’t see for so long.
I thought love meant making yourself smaller. More acceptable. Less “difficult.” I thought it meant apologizing for who you were and working tirelessly to become who other people needed you to be.
I thought love meant closing yourself around another person’s needs until you disappeared entirely.
But Buscaglia taught that real love works the opposite way: “Love is always open arms. If you close your arms about love you will find that you are left holding only yourself.”
Counterfeit love demands that you become what other people want. Life becomes constant performance. Constant adjustment. Constant sacrifice of your true self.
Real love delights in who we actually are. It creates space for us to grow, not shade that forces us to disappear.
Understanding this difference did something profound: it shifted the entire direction of my energy.
But here’s what I had to learn first. What took me years to understand.
You can’t give away what you don’t have.
Buscaglia taught that “Only when we give joyfully, without hesitation or thought of gain, can we truly know what love means.”
This is beautiful. True. Exactly right.
But only when you’re giving from a place of genuine abundance, not depletion.
For years, I’d been pouring my energy into people who couldn’t receive love, couldn’t reciprocate it, couldn’t even recognize it. I thought if I just gave more, tried harder, eventually they’d love me back.
That’s not love flowing freely. That’s energy being extracted under duress. That’s giving from an empty well.
Before I could give love freely, I had to learn to love myself first.
This was the missing piece. The foundation I’d been trying to build a life without.
I had to stop the outward flow long enough to turn inward. To discover that I was worthy of love not because of what I could provide others, but simply because I existed.
I had to fill my own well before I could offer water to anyone else.
And here’s what happened.
Once I started loving myself—genuinely, not as performance or self-improvement project, but as foundational truth—Buscaglia’s teaching finally made sense.
When you love yourself first, you stop asking, begging, performing for scraps of love from people who have none to give. You stop giving from desperation and depletion.
And then—only then—can you give the way Buscaglia describes: joyfully, freely, without expectation. Because you’re giving from overflow rather than emptiness.
Buscaglia was right: we love to love.
But first, we have to love ourselves enough to know the difference between giving and being drained.
When I finally redirected my energy toward people and pursuits that could actually receive it, when I started loving from wholeness rather than hunger, the velocity changed.
Love stopped being a desperate scramble and became a current I could ride.
Next: Everything you need you already are. The candle already holds the flame. The final truth about letting love move through your life at love’s full velocity.
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