I try to make myself easy to love...
Week 8
I try to make myself easy to love...
Hi, it’s been another tough week. And apparently, I am far from alone in that. I posted a poll on my instagram feed asking if anyone else was having a tough time or semester. I got 5 votes for it having been a good one and 50 for it being hard.
I just feel like something is wrong in our world. Very, very wrong. We are all so occupied with the fast paced, always accessible, no slack expectations around us. We are burning out in alarming rates. No one has the time to give, no one has the time to receive. We fight battles and feel like we can’t speak up because we all are in the same spot.
When there is no diversity in the sense that some people are okay when others aren’t and vice versa, we find ourselves with no one to lean on who has the capacity to handle a little extra. None of us have a little extra, even when we want to. And then our attempts to connect, to be vulnerable, to allow ourselves the space and time to feel without falling behind are all counterproductive instead of healing. It appears as though no one can really be there for you, and as a result, you feel unimportant. And the cycle continues around the circle.
Due to this, we are basically trained to be a watered down human being. We keep things on the surface and light and digestible for others. We try to not ask for much, to make things simple. Or at least I do.
I can’t really speak for everyone else, and I could be wrong thus far. But I always attempt to bring the happy with me, to smile. I put a hopeful spin on the things I am not hopeful about. Or I stay quiet all together. And to the friends I pass by but don’t see very often, that isn’t really a horrible thing. But when it gets to the deeper things with those very heavily involved in my life- I have a problem.
My problem is that I am human. I am messy, insecure, broken, wounded, and struggling. But I hide it very well.
When someone does something that hurts me, I have to go and process for hours before I can attempt to confront. I do this because I am immediately compelled to consider them before myself. I have to sit there and psycho analyze the situation, how to approach it, what exactly hurt me, how can it be fixed, how can I tell them without hurting them but still being effective, or do I blame myself and not tell them at all?
Most of the time, I never say what I want to say. I try to be extra kind to combat struggles or extra understanding of what they are going through that led to the action.
Basically, I hate emotions. I hate taking up time that people don’t have to solve a feeling I have. I hate being an inconvenience or giving people more of a hard time than they already have, whether they earned it or not.
So I water myself down, I try to make it easy for people to love me by giving them only the good parts of me.
The problem with that is- it isn’t real love. Not even close to it.
But to attain real love? It is so, so scary because none of us can do it perfectly.
I love past the point that I should with people, probably to compensate. I feel like if I can love through every hurt and fault without a second thought that maybe someday someone will do that for me. But we all hurt each other. We all mess up. We all disappoint ourselves and the people around us.
We have conditional love here. I have conditional love. We are not big enough to handle anything else.
But God... God has unconditional love.
God is the only one I can cry out to with my secrets, with my faults and guilts and shortcomings. God is the only one who has time for me 24/7, 365 days a year. Whenever I call out to Him.
God is the creator of all things and so He has the capacity to love me in a way that even I cannot love myself, let alone anyone else.
I think in the world that I know, with everyone spread especially thin and connection being more difficult than maybe ever before, I find myself constantly reminded that God is the steadfast in my life. God is the pillar where my heart rests even if rest seems to be nonexistent.
I guess my main point here is that yes, we need to heal. We are not okay. We cannot connect as God designed us to in the society we have cultivated. However, our focus was never supposed to be on people. But on God.
So while I am far from satisfied at the current emotional state of the world around me, I am trying to constantly ground myself in faith. And in hopes that community can be given a new life one day in a world that will never be able to un-know technology and its everlasting demands.
To ignore it is to be even more alone and out of the loop, but to give in is to fuel another sickness. We need to all collectively make changes from the workplace to the student down to the children growing into the world we are creating.
I am afraid to be all of me. And I may still function as I have been and continue to only show what is good. Simply because there is little to no time for anything much deeper. And I know I am not the only one doing it either. But I promise to be aware of others, to reach out beyond a standard expectation, and to be there for anyone who needs me. People will come before work, commitments, and all else. Because we need each other. And we need someone to tell us how important we are through actions, through creating space out of thin air when it is needed. And I hope that others join me in a pursuit of selflessness, of making others the priority, of sharing love that knows no limits. Even if we are just humans.
Till next time,
Lexi Cummings 11/12/19
Photo creds: Ines Lopez