God, my heart breaks when people give up on themselves.
I’m not talking about suicide. It’s the thousand little “giving ups” that make up life.
I’ve been there so many times with so many projects, with relationships, businesses, hobbies, events, everything.
When I do, the easiest thing for me to think is that I’m just a failure . . . That I’m worthless, that I’ll never be good enough.
Yes, despite years of working on myself to accept my shortcomings and be compassionate with myself, l go to those emotional places.
I still ruin things, my heart still breaks. I still feel like a failure. This whole bowl of emotions is easy for me to jump into. In some ways, it’s my default program; I can open that “app” whenever I want and feel smallness and sadness. I tap the program open more than I want to, like a compulsion of shame.
But what saves my ass from a total downward spiral of failure is love. It’s REAL love. It’s love from someone else who is committed to being on this journey with me and holding me to my highest potential.
I know, I know — the key to the journey we’re on is to learn to love ourselves. It’s to have our own backs when things get tough. But you know what, I’m just not settled into that glorious place of isolated self-love yet!
I want relationship. I want community. I want someone who can love me and doesn’t want anything from me. Someone who doesn’t twist the knife or make sure I’ve learned my lesson.
People who love for real don’t say “I told you so” or wait until the perfect moment to slip me their advice. They are just there with me. They see me, they accept me and they don’t need me to be different. They see both my power and my weakness. They see me fully clothed in my humanity.
When someone can see both things in me, that is the gentle hand of love that lifts me up.
I have relationships like that in my life.
Some people are better at loving than others. After all, it’s not like “How to Love 101” was a required class in High School. Love comes in so many different flavors and people perform loving acts at so many varying aptitudes.
I try to give that same love to others in my life. To walk alongside them in their best and their worst — in their successes and failures. Wanna know a secret? I fail at that too, and when I do, it is unquestionably the hardest feeling of failure I experience.
Every single connection I have is precious. We don’t really know the depth of pain and the struggles our loved ones are fighting just under the surface. No one has it together. No one has figured it out. The very least of all me.
But if I can hold the doors of my heart open for another, even when they may not be shining brightly back at me, that is my purpose in life. It’s deepening that which I consider my Holy Calling. I hope others keep showing up in my life who help me expand and can hold me in that same sweetness when tears have bubbled to the surface and I can no longer pretend I am only divine, but deeply flawed as well.