Love letter to myself

We are born knowing how to love our parents.

They are land and sky and sea and everything in between.

 

We are born knowing how to love our siblings,

In between “accidental” assaults and scapegoating,

we somehow remember that we are cut from the same cloth.

Built from the same blood and breath.

 

We learn to love our friends.

Building new, sprawling families,

soldered together in ambling conversations,

knowing there are people who have chosen to love you,

despite everything.

 

We are taught how to love our partners,

with hesitant hands and stumbling hearts.

Things have turned out differently before this.

We bloom, we bleed, we are forged anew.

 

But the lesson we never have time for,

written in the book we didn’t how to read,

was how to love ourselves.

How to coat our skin with belonging, with adoration.

How to write enough enough enough into ourselves.

We never learned how to scream back into a world that kept telling us that we were wanting,

a world that told us in a thousand different ways that we were the wrong answer.

 

Let yourself learn how to do this.

Before anything else, give yourself this.