Write a Love Letter to Yourself!
Courage Challenge Action Items:
- READ: this post
- CHALLENGE: write a love letter to yourself (keep the letter, share it, or burn it). This is just for you.
Valentines Week Challenge
Until recently, I entangled loving myself with conditional requirements. Requirements like…
“I’m only humble if I practice self hatred. Of course, I only hate the detestable parts of myself and love the loveable parts. Check!”
“You think dangerous, selfish thoughts that will ruin your marriage and relationships with others, so you’re only loveable if you only share the good parts.”
“You’re powerless to respond so keep people off guard with sarcasm, dryly delivered humor, anger, intimidation, and an equal amount of open love.”
“You’re only as loveable as the people around you tell you you are, so seek external validation in order to know your value.”
Stepping Out of Darkness
A year ago I stepped out of the cave of covert depression and into the light of life. All of the negative talk within my head kept me disconnected, protecting me from my own pain and shame. I worked hard keeping my trauma buried because I thought it would ruin my life if I let it out.
I didn’t truly love myself until I faced that trauma. By looking at and not turning away from my six year old self, my 10 year old self, my teenage self, my college self, my recent self, that I then fully accepted myself. I looked at and loved that hurt little boy, that hurt young man, that hurting adult male.
Fully accepting myself meant fully loving all the parts of myself, even the ugliest, meanest, most shameful and embarrassing parts of myself that I exiled. I thought I would win the game of becoming when I destroyed and buried my weaker selves.
It turns out, the better version of myself resides in all those versions of myself. It turns out, we become when we fully become integrated with ourselves.
The Courage Challenge
This week, write a love letter to yourself, all the versions of yourself, in which you fully accept and love, without conditions or shoulds, the entirety of your being.
Sick with disease or weakness in your body? Thank it. Do you hate a part of your body, your ears, your hair, your lips, your face, your belly? Put it in the letter and love it. Past hurt, past shame, past trauma? Love it all.
If you feel it and want to share your letter, post it in the comments. I posted mine.
To me, my beautiful friend, a love letter.
It had been a long time since we encountered each other. Never till recently did we stand before one another, absolutely naked and truthful, not hiding anything from one another. We agreed long ago to stay quiet, covered, buried and exiled. We both knew what our darkness hid; we honored our agreement to never unbury those parts of ourselves. But the years of oppression manifested great sickness and strife within us. During our darkness, you never gave up, even when leaving this life almost made more sense than staying in this life. I love you because you never did abandon me, even when I felt desperately lost and alone.
I love you David. I love you, brave little boy who got on the bus to kindergarten, alone and scared, to only have our hair pulled and to be called names because of our red hair. We sat powerless, afraid to respond. We never told anyone, no teachers, no parents, no bus drivers. I love you for exactly how you responded and what you did. You do not need to keep replaying the events in your mind, creating alternative reactions, alternative dialogues in which you respond like a hero. I love you David.
I love you David for transforming your powerless anger into dirty anger when you picked on, beat up on, the weaker kids in school. You felt powerless and tried to find power by dominating others. The flushed cheek of embarrassment you felt later when you found some of your own self actualized confidence, the distance you tried to put between that old you and the new you. There’s no distance now between us. I see you. I truly see you, accept you, and love you without conditions. Even today, we fear being powerless to respond, and I love you in your fear.
Even the clumsy, childhood sexual conduct with the neighbor boy that devoured our self love, shamed and desecrated our being, even that David, I love. I see you, that curious but shamed filled boy who didn’t have the power to speak his own mind but also was curious about his own body and the sexual feelings awakening within, long before “gay” was something we knew about. I see you all, accept you, and love you.
You David, my beautiful love, when drinking mattered more than anything else because it made us feel more like ourselves than almost anything else, beside football and other collision activities. Hurting felt so good. Being hurt, getting hurt, and inflicting hurt was our antidote to being. Drinking filled in the blanks of existence. We moderately binged drank and felt big. So big. I love you David, the David that found himself in drink, in sports, in pain. You hid a lot of shame for your grades, for your voicelessness, for your performance on the field of play, for your parents, for your way of being, for your perceived inadequacies, powerlessness, and sexual deviance. I love you David, and I love the you that kept it all buried, all hidden, all transmuted. I love the you that sought pain as your place of refuge.
David, there’s still so much more of you to love – your aging body, your receding hairline, your sagging skin, your voiceless opinion, your awkward interactions, your circuitous path of transformation, your insecurity around beautiful women, your judgemental thoughts about other men, your fear about coaching others. I love all of you. On this Valentine’s day, I start with loving you before all the other loves in our lives. I love waking up with you each morning and going to bed with you each evening. I love finding you, all the past selves of us.
Love, David