I did learn

Quite a lot, I’m seeing more every day. Now, the time I was there in Idaho, last year exactly.

She taught me so much. These eight months of isolation and solitude has taught me even more.

I’ve seen that everything she hated the most about herself she saw in her mom and others she loved. And I saw that for what it was at the time I was with her.

But I chose to learn how to love rather than how not to.

When you think about what you love in another person…doesn’t it reflect your own feelings?

Everything I love in someone is something I’ve already loved inside me. Those things that make my heart wilt and my body soften, those things are most sacred. They’re the most sacred because I loved them in me, first, before I ever loved them in anyone else.

My love for nature and solitude, I love them in me and I love them in others.

My passion for literature and language and all the ways to spin a web with them that’s so intoxicating we ALL fall into it daily…those sparks I see in others, and I loved them in me first.

My deep abiding love of freedom, of experiencing every part of the world I possibly can, of learning and curiosity and playfulness, those all I loved first in me.

So in a way, my loving anyone is by extension just me loving myself.

And yet people forget that. They seek those things they love about other people, or the ideas, and they forget that they loved those things in themselves first.

Or they get confused and think there’s nothing loveable about themselves, that only others are worth loving. And in effect, their love changes into self-loathing, and feeling lost without someone to give their attention to.

Those things I love most about someone else, I loved those things in me first.

I loved me first. And if I can give anything to those I care about, it’s to show them it’s okay for them to love themselves too.