Hi, dear lostandloving it! Wow what great responses your thoughtful question has prompted. I wish I had some sage wisdom to make it all click for you but I don’t. I can only point out what I’ve learned along my path. This part here, dear lost, flags me:

“I want to be his friend, but how do I get over this “Oh, I think I like you” part? I have to see him on the regular and even now, when I am forcing myself to get over him, seeing him so much is just… Well, it hurts. A lot. I feel worthless. Not good enough. It’s very confusing and defeating…”

Dear lost, you may “want to be his friend” but in trying to do so, you are re-wounding yourself! All of your inadequate feelings are reinforced with the “friendship.” It hurts you and of course it would! You are not expected to be so lofty and stalwart that would negate the very real feelings that you have. You are allowed to have your feelings! But you must also realize that in order to feel better, you must do things that LIFT YOU UP and MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD about yourself, not things that make you feel badly as you describe above. You may have to face the fact that for the moment anyway, you can’t “be friends” with this person because it is re-wounding you.

Also you say: “I know these are issues from within. I just don’t know how to handle myself. How do I grow self-love? How do I nurture it? How do I deal with my own power? My own feelings of helplessness or loss or awe of the everyday?”

To me this is really brilliant! You are aware and cognizant that something has to change so you can really soar! You are aware that you do have intrinsic power and that it SHOULD NOT be dependent on other’s opinions/attitudes/acceptance/validation, etc. of you. As you wrote above, and the other members echoed, physical beauty is fleeting. It does not define us (though I’d be foolish to ignore the fact that possessing physical beauty is considered an asset and is quite revered in society). What ends up mattering in terms of living an authentic life is being true to your nature and understanding that all else springs from that. For me, dealing with my own feelings of helplessness and/or loss is to accept those feelings and then let them go. Feel the feelings and let them go, as pointed out above. It’s all temporary, and when I let those negative feelings go I force myself to shift to something positive that lifts me up. In another thread I wrote about starting a gratitude journal. Corney though it sounds, it really worked for me. When I decided to do it my rule was that I had to write just ONE THING that I was grateful for in it every day (that’s how lousy I was feeling). Some days I wrote ‘my cat’ or ‘my sister’ or ‘a hot shower.’ Some days I repeated the same thing. But soon enough one thing became three, which became five and then 10 and before long things to be grateful for were just rolling in front of me! It really lifted me up and shifted my mood, which showed to the world at work and in life, and to which people reacted positively, which lifted me up more, etc. etc. I think you can get the drift. Today I enjoy a centered-ness that I hadn’t known before, all from trying to embrace what’s good and what makes me FEEL GOOD ABOUT MYSELF and let the rest go.

I hope this helps you some, dear lostandlovinit.

Love,
catdancing