Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, March 09, 2011

YOU

.
DO NOT


SUCK!

OKAY?

Look at yourself. Would you please? Inside and out!

Nobody knows you better than you do, in either of those areas.

Sure, from the outside - the world as a whole probably sees more of you than you do. But when it comes to any one individual in the world, nobody comes remotely close to how well you know your outside. You are up in your face, day in day out, scrutinizing flaws with a tooth-brush for God's sake. You critique the picture you present to the world to within an inch of its life, and not just on a beauty basis, either! You critique how you come across emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, professionally...you even give yourself shit when you feel like you come across better to others than you hold yourself to be! You treat it like a lie. Like you'll be found out.

Do you think the people you see around you don't have one hundred times the awareness of their own flaws that you have, when you look at them? Do you think they aren't walking around the same way: hideous, in tiny, imperceptible ways? An impostor, in how they are able to come across vs. how they feel inside?

And what about your inside? Oh, from the inside, you can see things there no one ever will. You hope. Yes, I know you have thought horrible things, even wanted horrible things. Darling you will say you have done horrible things. I don't judge you. Some things, you had to do. Some, you absolutely did not have to do. Some of these things - people know about them, to your everlasting remorse and sunburned shame. Some, only you know. And you hate those worse.

Do you think others don't burn just as painfully, from shame that you can't see? Suppose they all are burning? What if they all are? Would you look at them differently - worse? Would you then look down at them, as harshly as you look down at yourself?

Because these are the same people who save your life, every day, just by being in it. Who come in when you last expect, and do some small thing that rescues a part of a day you had rued. Who you wish you could be like. Well, what if you are? What if they are like you?

Have mercy on them, if so. But darling, have mercy on yourself, first. When it comes to you, only you can see the worst. When it comes to what you see in others - you don't see the worst, but what you do see is a real thing, a real part of who they are. The shape they are able to throw, and the action they are able to carve into the world - that is a real thing.

As real as what I see in you. The good I see in you is every bit as real as all of the good you have ever seen in others.

Hey, tell you what. Someday, if you're really, really good...maybe I will tell you my worst.

1 comment:

lacrema said...

Self-love is tough love.