I’ve started reading this book, it’s more of a working on myself kinda book.

And today I was instructed to write a love letter to myself. One that highlighted and acknowledged the parts of me that have done well and made it through the struggles. I’ve made multiple errors along the way, with and to myself. I’ve always been careful when it came to a second person but I’ve always taken me for granted.

I wanted to get this right this time. I wanted to work through it instead of write a random letter just because it was in my to-do list.

I started with thinking back to what a love letter had meant to me, from when I first knew the term. The thought process took me back to the origin of the term in my personal historical vocabulary.

A love letter was a letter written to a person, expressing how they felt about the person they were writing to, explaining why they felt a certain way about the recipient of the letter. This was my very first understanding of this concept.

And then it progressed to a letter that two people in love would write to each other while they were away from each other to emphasise how much the other person meant to them.

In these letters, one always mentioned the qualities and personality traits that were specific to the receiver and how that impacted the love the writer had for them. It barely showcased the shortcomings of the reader. What good will pointing out the flaws do anyway to their love story, right?

For me though, it always worked a little differently. I always felt the need to emphasise why the person needed to be & feel loved beyond their flaws and shortcomings. I always felt that knowing the good and the bad of a loved one is key to loving them completely. Hiding their flaws or negative personality traits from ourselves does not fool our mind into thinking it’s not there and that they are perfect, it just fools us into expecting something that is unfair of the person that we love.

(And also, what are imperfections anyway? Just a difference in thought, word and deed, personality and perception. Everyone’s got their right to be themselves and not each other, right?)

With this in mind, for me a love letter meant expressing my love for someone, keeping all of them in mind and acknowledging their perfection beyond just the visible ones, beyond the flaws, beyond the reason to love. It meant acceptance and love of everything, the perfect & the imperfect, the successes & the failures. It meant the acceptance of effort, no matter the circumstances.

Understanding this, I have been able to write the perfect love letter to myself today. Assuredly, this will change over time. The content of my letter will progress according to the growth of the content of the recipient, i.e., me. As I progress in years, so will the essence of my life, which in turn will affect the body of my letter. And I will grow to love me, beyond the flaws, beyond the imperfections, even to the perfect bits and pieces of me that exist, because of everything I chose & continue to choose to become.

With love,