I break my promises to myself.
I do it so often that I often don’t notice anymore.
Still, I will write out lists of tasks I promise to myself that I will complete, and then always will neglect to complete them. There are goals and tasks and dreams that have been withering at the bottom of my thought-drawer for years, waiting for the mould of despair to eat away at it, only seeing light long after the sun has set, when the clawing shadows of night pull them out for my guilty mind to behold.
My therapist reminds me that what my mind does echoes what it had learned to do in childhood to survive. Perhaps my lack of faith in myself only reflects my parents’ apparent lack of faith – which, to their credit, was really the spectre of immigrant anxieties, sheer fear willing into existence a good work ethic and thus a better life.
Even when I keep my promises, I excuse that as the expected result, nothing to celebrate. Yet every inch too short of perfection is magnified as a gaping fault.
But today I realized that this lack of faith is intolerable. Without faith, trust that I will deliver on my promises, every spectre of apparent flaw becomes intolerable, no matter how small or how fleeting.
And without self-trust, it is all too easy to deny self-love. And I write myself off.
Without self-love, there is no esteem to earn or to be given. Only an empty space, one that yearns to be filled with acceptance, trust, forgiveness, patience, kindness, safety, belonging, love.
Only space, never a home.
Without a home, there is no place for others to stay.
This, the deepest hurt of all: without a loving home in my heart, I cannot welcome others into it. And yet, there is still a space that yearns. And that space finds brief solace in passers-by, but no one else can provide the love and trust that I must create.
So the journey deepens and lengthens. What is love? What is self-love? Resting on trust in my potential, what could it mean to love with the whole self, whole-heartedly, with no empty space?
What will it feel like to build a home within myself, one where I can welcome others in?
dreamspindle 