the downside of loving (yourself)

People will make you second-guess the way you love yourself— especially if it’s too loud

My whole life I've been called “a lot”. And I mean, I guess that could be true? But to be honest, I’ve never been clear on what that even means because, a lot of what exactly?

I get that since we’ve devolved into a society that prefers muted responses and nonchalance, genuine self-expression can feel startling. And that being heartfelt and sincere will likely feel extreme when people opt to speak in parables and hieroglyphics rather than plainly saying how they feel.

So what for me is just a natural state of being, comes across as intense because I tend to take the most direct route. I don’t want to do any aimless meandering just because you wish to be avoidant. That’s a waste of time. And life moves too quickly for us to operate under the guise that time is in abundance, when it’s really of the essence.

So anyway, I guess that makes me ‘a lot’ or whatever.

And for a while, I was conflicted about it because I didn’t know how to be ‘less’. But God knows, I tried.

I spent a lot of my twenties trying to tone my intensity down, to be less of myself, in an effort to become more palatable. I thought maybe I needed to love myself, not necessarily less, but less loudly. Because that’s really what being yourself is—a very vocal expression of self-love

they said it, not me

People will make you second-guess the way you love yourself— especially if it’s too loud, too overt, too forthright. Especially if that’s not the way they feel about themselves.

It’s taken a long time and a lot of work to arrive here, but I like who I am; and more importantly, I love who I'm becoming. A lot of people can't say that and so the act of loving yourself bothers them, whether they realize it or not.

And if you’re like me, someone who is especially sensitive to other people’s emotions, you hate to feel as though you’re a source of discomfort for anyone. So when you notice that people are taking your self-love personally, you start to make compromises for the way you move through this world. This is especially true when it’s coming from someone you love.

You’ll want to become less (even if you don’t say it in those words) if it means that you’ll be accepted and loved in return. You try to minimize the impact of your very existence by becoming smaller because it’s easier to swallow.

But the thing about making yourself small is that, well, you become small. You end up with a small worldview, you start to think small, move small, play small.

You’re small.

Eventually you get so small that you lose yourself; you get so small you disappear. You’ve shrunk yourself so relentlessly that now no one can find you, including yourself.

I don’t know that in a big, huge world like ours, there is much value in a bunch of small people, trying to become the tiniest versions of themselves. Love will never ask less of you; if it does then it can’t be love.

People still tell me I'm a lot and I still don't know what that means. But after quite the journey back to myself, I think that if I am a lot, it is probably better for them to choke than for me to become digestible. I think it is better to find the people who like ‘a lot’ than to be less.

again, they said it not me!

The road between shrinking yourself to accommodate someone else’s limited palette and forgetting who the fuck you are is a straight line. And I think it is better to be unapologetic about who you are—because what is it that you’re apologizing for anyway?