You’re struggling. Everything feels hard right now. You’re faced with things you’ve never had to encounter before. You’re scared. You don’t know what to do.

I understand that you care about what people think about you. I know you don’t feel worthy of love. I know you look in the mirror and wish you were different. You’ve made mistakes and you’re not always right. You’re exhausting yourself trying to be perfect.

I suppose it makes sense that you want people to only see your best side, especially in a new relationship. Showcasing your best is human nature. We all care to a certain degree about what other people think about us. If we didn’t, I’d probably never leave my sweatpants.

But there’s so many things your mirror and your mind don’t tell you:

You are enough! The person that you are, the good parts, the bad parts, the ugly days, the great days, and even the worst parts only a few people have seen are ENOUGH! You are brave, you are kind, you are gentle, you’re loving, and you work hard. You give of yourself to the people around you. You have the capacity to make the people in your life feel special and valued. You are a good parent, a moral human, and a provider for your family. Your amazing far outweighs the battle you play over and over in your mind.

You see, your emotions lie to you. They tell you to believe you are not worthy of love. That if your humanity is revealed that you’ll be unloved or unwanted. But the beauty of love is that it has the capacity to see beyond what you see in yourself.

Your past does not define who you are today! Every time we fail at something we learn a lesson. Those failures weave into the fabric of our being. They affect our approach to the future and the make up of who we are. But just because you’ve failed at something before, does not mean that you are going to fail this time.

Every time you omit a part of yourself in the hopes to avoid the scrutiny of others you chip away at your own authenticity. When we have the courage to be the messy, flawed, emotional human that we are, we create the opportunity to be CHOSEN by someone.

When we fail in front of people we want to impress, we allow them the opportunity to love us through our failure.  To choose you even when you fail. To grow along side of us as we learn from our failures. Or to allow the building of the unconditional side of love.

People who choose to love us even when we’re at our lowest place, when our self esteem has dissipated, and we say or do the wrong thing… the person who loves us even if we hurt them or fail them…  they love even the parts of ourselves we hate, because they know those things makes us who we are. Those are the people who stay in your life. Those are the people you want to love in return.

Love is about way more than butterflies in the stomach and happy days. It’s about being able to be honest about what you are, where you came from, what you need, what’s important to you, and how messy you actually are. People have the option to learn about you and walk away. We all have the option to walk away from people in our lives. But if love is real, walking away isn’t an option. Love is a choice.

So when we alter our authenticity in an attempt to be the person we think someone wants, or hide behind a veneer of a smile when our world is actually falling apart, when we push aside the realities of our everyday life, we rob them of the CHOICE to love us. We do this because we are so afraid of rejection. We’re afraid of how we’ll feel about ourselves if we’re rejected. We can’t afford to carry another failure. As a result we put our best foot forward, push down any of our own darkness, compartmentalize, and exhaust ourselves creating the person we really wish to be. Not the person we actually are.

The problem with this friend is, it’s not sustainable. For anyone! It creates an opportunity for major disappointment. When the truth about who we really are becomes visible, it becomes much more difficult for other people to swallow. Have you been lying to me? Are you the person I thought you were? Have you been omitting a part of yourself? If so, who are you? What are you really all about? We create the space for an even stronger rejection because we have created an image that just isn’t TRUE.

Give people the chance to love you IN SPITE of your demons. BECAUSE OF them. Yes, it might mean people will walk away from you when you don’t want them to. It might mean that your type of crazy doesn’t align with another person’s crazy. It might mean that you’ll be left feeling rejected and alone. But it might not. You won’t know unless you put down the veneer you’ve created.

When we live authentically, we live freely. We say I want you to love me for my strange self. I want you to choose me! If you don’t choose me it’s not because I’m bad it’s because we’re not the same kind of strange. And that’s ok! Because in that moment, you choose to not be ashamed of who you are. You release the exhaustion you feel trying to hold it all together. You release the anxiety of pleasing others. You breathe for the first time. And you realize that YOU ARE ENOUGH! You are worth being loved by someone. Just exactly the way you are!

*And if they’re worth it… they’ll see it too.

#sonottogether