Love Yourself

My whole life my biggest fear has been being alone.
I've taught myself to be charming enough, likable enough, funny enough to have friends.
I thought these friendships were the glue that held my flesh together.
If they were to end or if I didn't do everything in my power to keep them, I would fall apart. Literally.
It's scary territory to be in a place where other people seem to control your fate.
I feel my friends pain, happiness, suffering and joy as if it were my own,
and to a degree - it was.
I have sewn my friends into the fabric of my being.
I do not belong to myself anymore but I belong to something and that is good enough for me.
I feel wanted. I feel needed. I feel that I have a purpose.
I rarely ask myself what I want.
My wants and needs are framed around others - I become a peacekeeper at the expense of myself.
I hate admitting this.
It's easier to love others than love yourself.
I think this is because you can't hide from yourself.
You know everything that you've done and it's easy to feel unworthy of forgiveness.
I think this is partly because it is easy to feel sorry for ourselves,
and partly because being forgiven - asking for forgiveness - means facing our demons.
I had a conversation with my friend the other day.
She helped me come to the conclusion that I define myself through others.
She says I have a hard time seeing worth in a relationship that I cannot give to.
She says I have a hard time separately myself emotionally from relationships.
She says I should try therapy.
She tells everyone to go to therapy.
I told her that therapy didn't work for me because I have trouble opening up to a therapist.
I don't like how it feels forced and awkward.
They would know everything about me and that doesn't sit right.
She asked me if I thought therapy might be hard because I couldn't offer the therapist anything.
That it was a one-sided relationship.
She was dead on.
I need to learn the importance of my own needs.
It is through this realization that I have recognized how much I want and need to forgive myself.
I don't like a lot of me.
My low self esteem is deep and underneath layers of optimism and bubbly happiness.
Admitting an ugly part of you and loving yourself anyways is not easy.
It's easy to make excuses for my problems.
Why you are the way you are.
I told myself that I had been through some shit but this thought didn't hold much weight.
Everyone has been through some sort of hell.
I kept trying to rationalize my actions and my thoughts.
Why? Why? Why? The burning question in my mind.
But I think it's when we stop focusing on the why,
stop asking questions about the things we did and the thoughts we had
and stop beating ourselves up senselessly on things we cannot change
and just forgive ourselves, that's when we're onto something.
That's the funny thing about forgiveness I think.
It's not about what you are letting go of,
it's about the state of peace you are moving towards.
Ever since I decided to start forgiving myself, I have been learning to love myself.
A little more each day.
I wonder if I am getting closer to God.
I'm still unsure what this means.
I have been feeling something lately though - deep within me.
I want to try and describe it but I fear it will not do it justice.
But it feels almost like a compass has been instilled in me.
Almost as if through forgiving myself, I earned it as a prize.
There are times when the compass feels far away and all I can hear is the faint tick ticking as the needle adjusts to the proper direction.
But there are other times when I feel the tick ticking vibrating on my eardrums, pressing on my heart.
As if the compass has been magnified to a hundred times its size and I am standing on the needle pointing to some direction I can't make out.
Because I am so small.
And too close up.
But it's ok because I am not even worried about the direction I am going.
I am just in awe.
This tension between feeling so far away and so close up has been frustrating in my faith but oddly comforting.
It's as if I am lost but I have a map and enough gas in the car.
I just know it's going to be ok.
I know I am going in the right direction despite the bumps along the way.
I just have to keep going.



Lesson from the Journey: Writing is therapeutic.