“Your opinion of love will always reflect the quality of people you’ve chosen to care about”- Rob Hill Sr.
No one understands love, anymore. Or perhaps they never did. It isn’t a single, particular event or action ever. It’s ever present and experiential and quite the challenge to put a set of letters words or phrases together to get a real feel for what love is. But in my experience, I’ve found modern day love to be somewhat of a pathology – a set of abnormal arrangements and deviations. Ultimately all roads lead back to you. When you change your pathologies of self love (the first place where love exists in life) then the people you love…friends…..lovers…..strangers changes too. THEY don’t change but how you love them does. You entertain them differently. And when you start loving yourself differently people think your selfish and start talking about you and passing judgement…shit hurts yo…BUT I wouldn’t change self loving practices. Nope….I’m not going back.
Think about the evolution to your relationship to food. Pizza can win over any group of kids or young adults, hands down. The desire is to be filled but not necessarily with substance. Place holders and fillers, one night stands and domestic partnerships. Something just good enough but has no stamina. The first slice is tempting. It engages and arouses the senses and creates this lustful desire (even craving) for years and years even. Until you hit 30ish. The once delightful slice of lust is no longer a meal but a piece of bread with tomato sauce smudged on it, dripping with processed cheese. It’s a boy with muscle marks on him dripping in disrespect. A girl with a fat ass dripping materialism and low self-esteem. But it has less to do with the actual ingredients and more to do with the quality of them.
Of late I’ve spent a significant amount of time trying to find my personalized love experience. One that is especially catered to my needs, my desires and my inconsolable need to complain about the love I did not have. This love not had wasn’t from something external but from something that needs to come direct from the source; me. Where as I once looked at love at the saving grace, the shining armor, the way to bliss. I started not to look for love at all. I sat still and watched myself engage with friends who were more concerned if I was coming to their turn up than when my life was turnt upside down. And I needed answers. Solutions. To shit I couldn’t figure out. I saw myself engage with men who were eager and happy to see me, spend time with me, but only after 11 PM and for a few midnight hour sessions of love. But when the sun came out, those were my darkest, darkest hours. So then I’m looking at myself like ‘who am I?’ and ‘do I love myself’. Do I stick up for myself the way I stuck up for my turn up friends? The way I stayed up waiting for him to creep into my bed? The answers weren’t surprising but devastating for a spirit already so broken to handle. And so I let go of those pathologies, begrudgingly but thankfully. When I envisioned what others would think, I thought about what I would think and how I would feel lest I allow them to ‘love’ me the way they were. In no time I lost all of them. Friends, lovers and family. I lost them because of me and I regret NOTHING. Because when my opinion of me, my values and my definition of self loved changed, everyone around me had to change too.
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