The thing about loving yourself first
If you can't love yourself, how can you love someone else?
They say if you can’t love yourself, how on earth could you love anyone else. But they don’t know you and I.
I have loved you since bees came to exist and there were no keepers in sight. Since Rhea laid loving eyes on Hestia and Cronus swallowed all he feared. I have loved you in this lifetime and throughout all timelines that came before. Stars have burned and lands have been swallowed whole and through it all I have loved you.
I loved you before they told me the person I must pour most of my energy into loving was myself.
Loving yourself is a great achievement and accepting yourself one too. But to use your very breath to inflate another is a purpose you don’t need to suffer to find and reason enough to exist. Doesn’t that feel like wetting your mouth on an abnormally hot English summer’s day? You don’t need to find your purpose as it exists within the loving of your soul mates. Everything else you do is called living.
When someone first told me this statement I believed them. I dreamt that all woman’s love for themselves would run deeper than any love they’d known. Then my sister nurtured life from seed to child and I knew it couldn’t be true. It is possible my sister doesn’t love herself and it’s possible your sister doesn’t either. A mother’s love for her child does not waver because she has been carved with hip dips or berates herself for being too sensitive. It holds fast. A steady roll of cinnamon-dusted dough wrapping her child in sweetness and love.
Perhaps they told us this so we stay sitting in front of the mirror worrying about how age is carving youth from our faces or we’d spend our time taking online quizzes about our anxiously attached, introverted-extroverted, Venus-rising, avoidant, projector ‘selves’ because admitting that we’re just a human made of soul and flesh and bone wouldn’t sell very much indeed.
Perhaps you realise that loving yourself may be a wonderful thing but not the only thing. Then open the backdoor and let the anxiety of becoming someone you could love leave, and decide instead to love the world that was crafted for you. Turn the mirror around and absorb the night sky. Let the deepest shade of blue alter the axis of your world. Eat your marmalade like it’s homemade sunshine cased in a jar just for you.
Maybe the way to truly love ourselves is found in the way we love others, so swear to love someone until the end of the world stands on your doorstep and long after it’s invited itself in for sustenance. And even longer after that.
Kirstie xxx
“You know you're in love when you can't fall asleep because reality is finally better than your dreams.”
- Dr Seuss