Tell me what you love. Tell me the people you love. Take a moment and think about it.
Now, continuing on. Scrolling through my Tumblr dashboard, I found a photoset of very inspiring words. I searched the quote on google and landed facefirst in Ashley Wylde's spoken word, Meet Yourself in the Mirror. It talks about love, and not in the way you would expect. We attach the word love to so many things and so many people, but rarely would we attach it to ourselves. Watch the video and tell me that it did not move you in more ways than one.
Let's get to it:
What made my heart shatter into a million pieces after watching this video is the truth that she brings. It's something I, and I bet a lot of you too, cannot put into words. The love we share is rarely the same love we give ourselves. Because it seems like such an impossible task to love yourself when you know what goes on in your head and all the mistakes you've made.
I live by this quote: If you had a friend who speaks to you the same way you sometimes speak to yourself, how long would you let this person be your friend?
Ashley continues to talk about how her grandmother gave her very good advice.
Meet yourself in the mirror, make a date of it, and even if its strange keep looking until your eyes become skies with constellations of life and everything else falls away. Examine every inch of your face and feel however you feel about it but be thorough. See even the things you don't like to see and when you know your face like you know a friend's meet your eyes again, and when its awkward or forced, do the best that you can and with all the sincerity you can muster say, "I love you".
This made me think because it's something I'd never do. I greet the reflection in the mirror with sincere hostility most of the time, and saying I love you to someone that I know is undeserving of such emotion seems so far-fetched. I know myself from the inside and out, far better than my family and friends. I know all the things I have said, all the people I have hurt, and all of the lies that I have spewed since I was 4 years old. My mind is a collection of my mistakes, neatly folded and stored away in metal drawers. It is near-impossible for me to genuinely love myself, and I know most people would feel the same. It's easy to love someone else because they only let out what they want you to see. Everyone has a dark side, and it's difficult to see yourself in a positive light when everything about you screams otherwise.
You cannot say 'I love you' without the implied foundation of 'but i love myself first'. If you do not love yourself, every time you have ever said 'I love you', it was a lie.
I thought that line was incredibly moving. But that provoked a thought in my little Catholic brain. I remember in the third grade, we were taught the opposite. There was a picture of three circles on top of each other, one smaller than the other. At the bulls-eye was the word God, in the second ring was the word Others, and in the outer ring was the word You.
I was taught to love God and others way before I should love myself. To serve God first and then the people around me. I don't know whether it's just my extremely Christian school, but loving myself has never been a subject worth mentioning. We were supposed to love our enemies and treat our neighbors as we would like to be treated, but we were never taught how to love ourselves. My school put so much emphasis on other people that it neglects our self-esteem completely. If we had trouble loving ourselves, we would be reminded that God loves us, hence so should we. We were never given the chance to love ourselves independent from others. The love we have for ourselves should be based on the love given to us by others.
Love is a tree, and if we don't grow it from the roots, we'll spend our lives collecting dried leaves.
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