A Love Letter to Myself - The Hardest One to Write
Dear me,
This is a letter of love from me to, well, me, and I don’t even know where to start.
I’m embarrassed that I don’t know how to love what I see in the mirror.
I know I should, and I believe the work I am doing to unlearn old conditioning will help me to get there.
Maybe the truth is that I don’t know how to love myself as I am. I’ve been pretending that I knew how to navigate the world for so long, and the only thing I could change to fit in was me.
My grandmother told me, over and over, that boys don’t like smart girls. My mother told me being skinny is important. The TV and school told me that my (natural-then, not-natural-now) blonde hair was a defining feature. And the boys reiterated that when I was skinny I had value for attention, and when I wasn’t, I didn’t.
I was taught to quiet my “bossy, know-it-all self” long before high school. And I learned to pretend to think drinking was cool, and to make one drink last all night, but act drunk. Because I had grown up seeing what alcohol can really do, but I knew I needed it to fit in.
I got to grow up and out, and intellect was valued at work. Kinda. It still came with social interactions and political implications. And I had to be careful that I wasn’t seen as smarter than those in power. And it still mattered how I looked.
So, you see, it was against this background that I had to learn how to love myself. Or not as it were.
Why now?
Well, I did find a partner and we chose to have a baby. And my body changed again. But in some ways, it didn’t matter then because all of my focus was on loving that little soul and keeping him alive in his early years.
Then, as he grew, I realized I would need to really, truly love myself so I could show him how to really, truly love himself.
And I loved him enough to know how important that was.
I learned that parenting was about truthfully showing vs. just telling. I could tell him he needed to love himself, and perhaps even how, but until I embodied it, until I learned it for myself, he would never learn the true lesson.
For, how could I teach what I didn’t know?
And how could I instruct him to respect all women when I didn’t know how to do that either? Now, I really believe in a more gender-neutral future, but I feel I have to learn to respect myself even in the “old” (really still current) rules so that, hopefully, he can view respect from a more healthy foundation and then grow from there.
And, so that I can too.
So here I am looking at a woman in a mirror.
I know her darkest secrets, I know her greatest joys.
I’ve walked every step with her, but I still have trouble believing when people say nice things. What do they see that I don’t?
So I thought of what I would say to me as a friend -
I know I am brave.
I know I am strong.
I know I am smart.
I know I am beautiful when I smile at people I love.
I know I love animals and children, and I will protect them over anything.
I know I am kind.
I know I love deeply and fiercely.
I know I am creative.
I know I see light differently.
I know how lucky I am and how grateful I am to know that.
And that’s a lot to love. One step at a time.
For I know that this is the most important love of my life.
Love, a work-in-progress me
“The only thing that was ever wrong with me was my belief that there was something wrong with me.”
