This week I want to get into a tricky topic for me. It may still only be a tip of the iceberg, but I want to make an attempt at it.

Being a strong people pleaser (some may debate this, but I assure you if I wasn’t, things would have been a lot worse than they currently are), and wanting to stand my ground, most of my life has been a constant battle.

On the rare occasion (maybe more medium rare than rare?) that I challenged authority, I have regretted it so much so that I have felt like such a mess up. I have doubted my intentions and questioned my actions till a point that I knew I could have done it differently or more peacefully or even just complied and avoided the whole thing altogether.

I went through my entire youth feeling like a mistake about to happen. Every cautious step that I took landed me in sh*t and I blamed no one but me for attracting the kind of energy I did. Even when I wasn’t to blame, I blamed me for having gotten myself into that mess. I blamed my existence, my person for everything that went wrong like they were the consequences of my actions or my being. I overthought everything and somehow managed to find the faults only in my own actions.

After I had my first born, when I became a parent for the first time to an actual human baby (I have been an irresponsible pet parent before – a story to be shared at another time), a baby girl nonetheless, I realized the weight of all of those past mistakes that were holding me captive. Mistakes that weren’t mine, but I gladly took on the blame for, and the burden that I carried because of it.

I realized that I needed to lay them down before they suffocated me. But now, it was too late, all those faces were far gone, and all that time had passed. Where and how was I supposed to lay them down now? I was rolling down a steep hill, with nothing to break my fall. For nearly 7 years, I was barely surviving because of it.

And then I entered 2023. I was suddenly presented with the time that I needed to work on myself, and my desperate searches led me to the right person to guide me through this.

Over the course of the last year, let’s say from the start of 2023 to the end of it, I have been on a self-awareness journey – getting to know who I am and learning to let go of all the years of blame and hate and regret. Learning how to remember to choose & support me through everything that was thrown in my direction over the year, was one of the toughest things I have had to do. I did trip over my own feet a couple of times, but I am learning how to stand back up.

I am learning to let blame lie where it should instead of shouldering it myself to maintain the peace.

For me, doing something that would directly impact someone else’s wellbeing and happiness isn’t a difficult decision to make. But I was conditioned to believe that if my own happiness and wellbeing came at the cost of another’s, I had to sacrifice. Prioritizing self only came from selfishness. And selfishness is a sin.

Selflessness, on the other hand is a beautiful way of life. It is holy and it is immaculate. Which is all true. But I have also come to believe that selflessness needs to be chosen and not enforced, for it to be perfect and pure, the way it was intended. And sometimes selflessness also includes loving yourself first. Balance is key.

The Bible teaches, ‘Love another as you love yourself.’ So, how do you love another as yourself when you have no love for yourself in the first place?

In the past, being held accountable for everyone else’s feelings and hurt and shortcomings had put me on a level of hyper vigilance that made normal functioning almost impossible. How does one love that way anyway, constantly worrying if the person in front of you is happy all of the time and if they aren’t, is it my fault? What can I do to fix it?

I have come into 2024 realizing that loving myself is not wrong. In fact, it is amazing. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s what’s trending right now, right? Sometimes there’s just so much toxic positivity around that it’s hard to decipher what’s real and what is not and it’s overstimulating to go through all of that information and think that you’re the only person who is struggling with being able to love yourself. But you’re not. Loving yourself is the hardest thing to do in this competitive world we live in. We just don’t feel like enough with all the commercial standards out there for everyone to compare.

You’re not alone though. I’m not alone.

This year, I want to work on testing my limits at tolerance – tolerance to the inconsideration I experience from others who have little compassion for themselves, so they mirror that onto everyone around them. I want to show compassion toward my body and mind for the little things. I want to teach myself forgiveness, forgiveness for the weight of the blame that I carried that wasn’t mine to bear. I want to let go of the regret that I feel for opportunities that I couldn’t take on, for conversations that could have gone better but didn’t because I wasn’t in the right place then – it’s all okay, I’m only human and I’m allowed to make mistakes. The mistakes I’ve made and the regrets I’ve had don’t make me less deserving of this life I have today.

I want to practise patience and strength. I want to tell myself that letting someone walk all over me because I am on a journey of patience and love and acknowledgment, is enabling of that behaviour and does more harm than good to everyone involved. So, I want to practise patience with myself to work at building strength – strength in standing up for myself without the fear of being judged for it.

Anything besides these is only contradictory to the path that I am currently on.

To end today’s rant, I’d like to say that love and respect need to go hand in hand. An act of love cannot & should not be aligned with something that is as hateful or hurtful as disrespect.

Hate can only be hate. And love can always only be love.

Anything that causes another to feel unvalued and not enough can never be justified as an act of love. And this criterion makes it easier to decide if the blame you’re taking on is really worth the effort for the person laying it on you. More often than not, it’s not.

I’d like to conclude by saying, let’s preach love, let’s think compassion. Let us only take on blame & regret from a situation where we go against our natural human instinct and hurt another just to make ourselves feel better!

Love always,