Partial Love is Exhausting

I have been going in deep lately on figuring out the rest of my life. Questions about my writing path, my current finances, savings, retirement, even down to my plan in my final days.

There have been moments when I’ve felt pretty down. Not because I’m going to be gone from this earth one day, but because after all this time living, I haven’t spent enough time enjoying who I am and what I am. When you start planning out the end, it makes you reflect on the now, and I need to get to the business of fully loving myself. There, I said it. Partial love is exhausting. Partial friendships are exhausting. Not knowing is exhausting. The crazy thing is, it’s bad enough to not know where you stand with a friend, but when you don’t know where you stand with yourself — now that’s probably the most unhealthy position there is. And now I’m looking at myself and saying, “self, you have got to remember your soul, your God self. And let the rest go. Shut down the other voices.”

Then there’s the thing about what I am. I am not going to write what I have not done. That’s what I just deleted. What I’m going to say is, for the rest of this life, I’m going to focus on the now and work from there. I lied. The only time I will look back is to look at the list of the things I’ve accomplished so I can appreciate how far I’ve come. I’m going to remember the very words I tell students. I mean, is it a secret when I see so many of them struggling to see their worth, I see me? True, I am not where they are. I’ve seen my work pay off. I’ve accomplished some dreams. I have stable and healthy relationships in my life. Nonetheless, the encouraging words I tell them — “you deserve this,” “don’t call yourself [insert negative epithet],” “don’t give up,” — they are words I don’t heed for myself but need to remember.