“Siddhartha was thus loved by everyone. He was a source of joy for everybody, he was a delight for them all. But he, Siddhartha, was not a source of joy for himself, he found no delight in himself.”

While reading “Siddhartha”, by Hermann Hesse, I stumbled upon many life lessons that I reflected upon my myself but when reading this quote hit me the hardest. I related to this quote tremendously. This quote explains the life lesson of being loved but not loving yourself. Siddhartha was a popular man is his village and many looked up to him and whispered about him in the best of ways possible. However, he didn’t enjoy himself, wasn’t happy with self, he simply had no self-love. I know that many struggle with this as well. It’s hard sometimes when you show your face into the world and it’s like a giant bubble of joy, happiness, and love but when you’re alone all of your emotions come out and it’s like never ending rain on a dark day. It gets to the point where the love people show you isn’t even near enough to fixing the emptiness of your own self. You can always fake a smile on the outside but on the inside, you can’t hide from it.

This picture correlates with the topic above because it shows how the woman puts on a mask everyday and hides her true emotion, her sadness. Showing that you can mask your sadness but it won’t go away. I speak on behalf of this because I have struggled with really bad depression in the past and I had all of the love and support in the world from my friends and family but I was never truly happy and always faked a smile because internally I felt alone and out of place. Struggling with body dysmorphia was not fun and I had a really tough recovery and I had no self-love. I masked my emotions and faked my happiness everyday. I had many friends and many could say that I was just a ray of sunshine and rainbows. When I was alone was when it was the worst, I was able to nit-pick everything that I hated myself and it ruined me. The voices in my head telling me I wasn’t god enough or didn’t fit the beauty standard never left me alone. I however am a lot better now and have since then found my self-love and confidence. The moral of this story is that you can be loved by the world but if you don’t love yourself, you can never be truly happy. I was unhappy, but never alone.