The most painful things we experience relay back to the same idea. Loss. And it is just an idea. We don’t mourn what we lose, we mourn what part of us dies because we can’t see ourselves in the context of that thing anymore. We lose a job, a partner, control, sanity, love and we feel as though we are suddenly incapable because we’re always relying on something else to make us feel that way. We’re scared that we’ve lost yet another thing that confirms we aren’t failures, another person whose love could infuse us with just a little more hope. We’re distraught over the fact that there isn’t another someone there to love us even when we don’t. It’s rarely about the thing or person, it’s about us. Because we don’t want to exist unless we’re wanted.
We don’t want to stop looking in the mirror and hating ourselves because the reward of shoving our fingers down our throats and making ourselves vomit is just too gratifying when we realize we’ve lost another pound. Because hating someone is easier than loving them despite what they’ve done. Because complaining is easier than changing and not risking things puts us in a false but convincing state of security. Because what the alternative to those things does is open us to the loss of what we know to be right and true and leaves us with the reality that we have to learn to love without condition. Standing face to face with the very thing we struggle most to accept. And so we attack that thing that threatened us. We attack it, we attack others, we attack ourselves, we’re like screaming children in fits of rage while a glaring parent gazes over and says “are you done yet?”
We don’t know how to feel beautiful until someone turns to us and says that we are. But what does it even matter anyway? We won’t believe them. We’re so skeptical that there’s anything worthy or beautiful about us that we believe people to be disingenuous even when their intentions are most pure. We don’t know how to love people outside of the context of what it means that we love them. And we don’t know what it means to live outside of what we acquire and accomplish. We measure ourselves in dollars and titles and in the belt of societal success when the true wonder is in the fact that we just are. We don’t know how to exist unless we’re wanted.
We think the only real failure is losing what we use to define ourselves, what we use to convince ourselves that we are allowed to feel happy and whole and worthy and alive. Because the mystery of our presence, our existence, is too large for our minds to understand sometimes.
So why do we care? If we know this, why do we go on squeezing ourselves into things that will make us handsome and lovable and wanted (literally and metaphorically?) Because we want to be wanted and we need to be loved. And it’s not about being hailed by nations for our beauty and wealth. It’s simple. It’s natural. It’s important. We can’t keep denying what is so innately true of us. That we need to be loved. And we should also love people not for what they are and what they do for us but because they just are. That’s where it begins.
We have to start recognizing love as a smile from a stranger on a day you’re feeling like there’s no hope left and a text on your birthday from your once secret lover because they remembered you somehow and being able to pay the bills or not and feed yourself or not but regardless know you’re trying and at the end of it all just being able to take a breath and feel happy for absolutely no reason at all. That’s what we have to start filling ourselves with while filtering out our desire to take the easy, destructive way out of being what we are. Human. Because when we know that’s all that’s left, we fear we’ll be left with nothing when people inevitably attack it. Little do we realize, that’s just the thing– the only thing– that is absolutely invincible.
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