I hope that you DO respect yourself to know that you deserve the best.  Because you do, you know.

But I also know it can be a long journey to get the point where you respect yourself that way.  So I wish all the best for you on that journey.  I hope you find happiness and strength and self-fulfillment and a healing of old wounds.

And if you haven’t started it yet, I hope that you find the strength and courage and support to do so.  Those first steps can be terrifying, because you fear how much it will hurt if you fail.  But it turns out that even when you falter and trip, it never, never hurts as much as staying in the dark where you were at the beginning.  Even if you couldn’t make it all the way, it would still hurt less than where you were at the beginning.  But it also turns out that the journey is always there waiting for you, so you can pause as many times as you need to, and then take it up again.