December 3, 2015 · Filed under Healing & Growth

When your world falls apart, can you still love yourself?

Heads up! This post is 9 years old. In 2021, I restarted my blog after many years of not writing regularly. See the the new stuff!

I want you to be able to stand in your life, with all its sweetness and confusion, and know that who you are is enough.

I want you to be with your pain and sadness and despair and not make yourself wrong.

I want you to hold your suffering so tenderly that every hurt part of yourself can feel it.

I want your fierce self-love to shine like a beacon in your inner world, calling all the lost parts of yourself toward the light and the warmth to be healed.

There are no guarantees in life, and suffering can be upon us in a millisecond.

Even if you are not suffering, someone near you undoubtedly is.

Keeping your heart open enough to meet yourself and the world and love them both is hard. It means suffering heartbreak over and over as you expand to take in more and more of the reality of the world.

It means accepting that there is a fundamental paradox to life: beauty and harshness live side by side in this world and neither ever goes away.

But here is a secret: when you love yourself, you carry the beauty with you. You walk through this upside-down world rightside-up. You know the truth when you see it. You become a conduit for love and compassion.

When you stop guarding your heart, you start strengthening it.

And one day, the scales just tip.

And you don’t just see the beauty, you are the Beauty.

You no longer fear the darkness, because you indelibly belong to the Light.

This is God. It is not a belief. It is an experience. The belief part is only needed when the darkness overwhelms you temporarily and you can no longer feel that inner connection to the Light. Then you use your faith to bring yourself back to it.

But we are not meant to live on faith alone. We are meant to experience this state of Grace daily. We are meant to live there.

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Hi there! I’m Emma and I write about self-liberation. My writing is meant to share my process & inspire your own. If you want more frequent/current writing, visit my Substack Sparkly Dark, where I’m unpacking my neurodivergence.

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Thanks so much for reading! ~Emma