to love yourself or not to love yourself...

I think every other new self help book carries the exact same message "love yourself", "be your best friend", etc, etc...
They claim that all the relationship problems would be cured if you could just learn to depend on yourself...blah blah.
I know I am not mother Teresa or anything but I would like to think that I spent a lot of my life catering to others & centering my life around my loved ones... Perhaps the cliche of "losing ones self" was me.
I talked to someone about that & they said: "Aimee, you know how they announce on airplanes that if there is an emergency, you must always put your own oxygen mask on before you help your children put on their masks? Well, life is like that & you are useless to anyone if you don't take care of yourself."
So I thought "cool... so the drowning feeling I have been feeling is my mind/souls way of telling me that I need to look out for #1. I can try that!"
After all the fashionable hype about being who you are & loving yourself, I thought I would serve myself a hearty helping of that... only to find that the minute I tried, LO & BEHOLD according to the people I loved I was now a SELFISH bitch because "no man is an island"
WTF, darned if you do & darned if you don't....
SO, what is really right again? I ask myself, losing yourself by being so preoccupied with making people happy or "LOVING YOURSELF"?
I come to the realisation that the occupational hazard of loving yourself probably means being alone & feeling alone most of the time. I would say that in order to truly be who you are you have to prepare yourself for the reality that you may not get the approval of your loved ones & they will choose to leave you.
Most people think that if you do what you want & if you don't do what they want you to do that you DO NOT LOVE THEM. This is not true.
You can love someone AND still want to do what you want to do.
The only way "loving yourself" would work is if not just YOU see its importance, but if your partners & family see its importance as well.
If they could understand that doing what I want to do doesn't mean I don't love them.....
yeah so that is my rant & wishful musings :)
peace