#2| A love letter to those struggling to receive love.

We are very often taught how to stand up to hate and receive/process it with bravery, grace and maturity. And that.is.awesome. Extremely needed and can actually save someone's life. But what about a genuine compliment? Encouragement? A constructive feedback with some suggestions for improvement? Even a back-handed, hurtful compliment that is actually also love, but the kind that cannot even be seen or accepted because how it is shown is so sickening?

I actually think that knowing what to do with hate and being able to internalize love could go hand-in-hand: both make us cringe at times. What I think it comes down to is permission. We need to give ourselves permission to heal from hate, take back the power and, eventually, come to a place of forgiveness just like we do when love comes our way.

This is, of course, never easy so I wanted to give a shoutout to all the beautiful souls in my life who have been finding it especially hard to hear kind words, accept kind actions from others and just take in love in any form. I am so sorry that the pain and trauma you have experienced left you feeling like you are somehow not deserving of being loved exactly as you are.

Often accepting care and affection is the biggest act of bravery and I see many people committing it daily and I want to acknowledge that. I see you. You deserve all the love you get and I hope with everything I have that you start believing it yourself.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#3| Positive affirmations I wrote to myself this week.

I am BIG on uplifting others and doing things like sending random messages of love and encouragement to those I love. This week, I have decided to turn that energy inward. In a society that is only now warming up to the idea of self-love and self-compassion, doing things like this takes major guts. I hope that reading this gently nudges you to take a moment and appreciate yourselves. You deserve it. Here they go: 1) I like how your hair looks today! 2) Good job being patient and taking the higher route when your initial reaction was to loose your cool. 3) You deserve all the love you give to others. 4) People who say they love you actually mean it. They don't just say it out of pity despite what you have been told. 5) When people don't respond to your messages, it's nothing on you 98% of the time. 6) You are whole and have all you need within you to be your best self. 7) You do NOT need external validation. 8) You have the power to hold yourself accountab...
Read more

#6| A love letter to those hurt by organized religion.

Growing up, I was never pressured into any religion and, for that, I consider myself to be lucky. As I got older, a few people starting talking to me about their faith, the Bible, Adam and Eve and so on. While a couple of those people were pushy, ultimately, I was still free to explore my own faith. When I moved to the States and plugged into a Methodist church, I was (and continue to be) treated with nothing but abundant love. To this day, people at my church embrace me even from afar and when I stop by during my trips back. Here is the flip side, though: the more people I talk to about faith and religion (two very different things in my opinion), the more I realize that not everyone is this lucky. A white, straight person from a stable enough economic background and with exclusively positive experience of "church", even I stopped being able to find motivation to come to church. The problem was never my home church, not was it ever with God and I. Rather, it was organized...
Read more

#4| A love letter to the survivors of sexual assault.

A couple of days ago two pretty famous people in Russia, a married couple, made some nasty comments regarding women who survived sexual assault and abusive relationships. (Your sadly typical "you should not have been dressed this-or-that way", "you were asking for it by...") Interestingly enough, the wife has received plenty of criticism (obviously) and has already apologized twice. She claims to have decided to turn her platform into a safer space for survivors and has even reached out to some organizations that help survivors in Russia. While her sincerity is still questionable to me, I find it much easier to have empathy and grace for her than for her husband. In all honesty, he has been a total a-hole about the whole situation, calling people names in his comment section on IG (full of pretty heated comments too) and has shown absolutely ZERO remorse or compassion towards those he had hurt. All this to say, we still have a LONG ASS way to go in my country a...
Read more