I wrote this 2.16.21. But it feels like today is the day to post it. With love, CC
You are right. Not because you’re right. Not because you need to justify or list reasons or tell yourself it’s healthy or belittle yourself because it’s not. You don’t have to go round with yourself and dance circles around the feelings and moments and perfection. You don’t have to.
But I do. I dance with my thoughts and leap through hoops with them and dig deeper and avoid and wonder why I feel anxious. But no one teaches us to know our thoughts. No one taught me how to search them out. And I am still learning every day to feel them and know them and call them mine, without doubt.
My mother was in constant mental anguish when I was a child. And with all the tumult, I had given myself the story that she should have listened to others to understand she needed help.
She needed herself.
I thought she needed help from others, and that’s why she couldn’t see herself ruining her life and relationships. And if she could just listen…
But I wonder if I saw it incorrectly. I wonder if she truly needed herself. I wonder if she needed her own guidance, her own mind, her own self-reflection. I wonder if she needed to ask for help. Not because she knew what was wrong, but because something didn’t feel right! And those around her were looking back at her in pain. And she kept charging at them.
But our pain can be elusive to us. Our own pain can look like reasons it isn’t ours.
So the lesson is possibly two-fold.
- One must see their own pain as their own. The reactions are a mirror of their own feelings. One must be in each moment, alive with that feeling, so its impression can be most honest right there. Later assessments are more likely to carry stories and delusions.
2) And one must create their own help. One must love themselves enough that they won’t prolong pain and anguish by judging it. Instead, their greatest feat will be learning to love the pain until they see why they are there, why they feel it, by holding its hand. They must create a bond that doesn’t separate one from themselves, so that hate and love are interchanged easily and confused as the other.
The thin line between love and hate is within ourselves too.
It feels big because we all grow up watching someone deal with themselves. And we can love them or hate them for their example. But at the end of the day (what does that mean anyway), at the end of the episode, the anxiety, the pain, the infliction we perceive, is our own mind, our own face, our own reaction, our own infliction. And if we can learn to love its relationship with ourselves, simply, so simply because it is ours!
Well, can’t we change it all, without trying to change a thing?
Can’t we effortlessly show ourselves great love and the world around us?
Can’t we blissfully accept the very reality of who we are and love ourselves into a place where we mirror that love and without even trying… we change every mirror we look into and every interaction is traced with this effervescent love, that although flawed, although sometimes misconstrued, is still love. And we give every interaction, every person, every moment with ourselves, permission to be flawed and loved too?
I wonder. I hope it’s true.