i've been following you for a long time and over the last few months you've made SUCH a transition, you went from obviously being really insecure to being confident and loving yourself and now you just seem to love other people so much and honestly its amazing
Learning to love myself has done so much for my ability to love other people. The process took patience and compassion and care, and now I try and use that patience and compassion and care and give it to every person I come across. Why?
Because, when you go on this journey to loving yourself, you learn so much about what makes your mind work. You realize how deep your being is, how deeply rooted each of your problems are and how hard it is to just… be a person.
Every once in a while when your patience is being tested at a party or a restaurant or in an argument with someone, stop for a moment.
Look at their faces, and look in their eyes.
They fall in love, they fuck up and hurt people, they lead these deep, rich inner lives that we’ll never fully understand. Each person you walk by on the street or that hits you with his shoulder and doesn’t stop to apologize, they’ve had a million interactions and have been hurt and have lost people they love and have dreams.
You don’t have to like everyone. I’ve met people I’ve loved and people I couldn’t stand but in my entire life I never met someone who didn’t matter. You can still think Todd from the lacrosse team acts like a total sexist dick, but his life and his existence still has value.
I love people so much. People are so important. Every life is so fucking precious, and the fact that there are organizations and people trying to make us feel insecure, grind us down to make us feel worthless, all so they can make money off of us? It’s horrible, and I don’t want to stand for it.
You are so priceless, and everything you do I want you to do out of love for yourself and your fellow human beings Don’t let those people control you, because as long as we allow our worth to be defined by others we will always be held down.
Love and understanding and compassion and kindness are going to be what saves us. We aren’t aspiring to “we are all the same” because we’re fucking not, we’ve all been through different things, some of us have privilege and opportunities that others don’t and “we are all the same” writes off the experiences of those without privilege as though they don’t matter.
“We are all the same” isn’t the answer. “We are all different and that’s fucking rad” is the answer. “We are all fundamentally different as human beings and have different perspectives and opinions and things to offer” is the answer. “We are all a part of the same species and even though we’ve lived through completely different experiences we can still value one another as important and valid human beings” is the answer.
Learning to love myself showed me that what made me hate myself in the first place was a series of flawed systems in a world filled with fundamentally good people that is, unfortunately, mostly not run by those fundamentally good people.
It showed me that every human being is worth so much, and if the entire fucking world wants to tell you that “your body is wrong” and “you are ugly and worthless” and “you deserve to feel like garbage to be who you are” then I’d rather change the entire world than let one person see that far into the pit.