30 days of self-love: worthy

Yesterday was my partner’s and my anniversary. This is the first healthy romantic relationship I’ve been in. Healthy as in I’m healthy enough to be a supportive, aware, loving, independent partner and I’m with someone who is the same.

The simple truth is that I am still with this person today because I know I am worthy of a beautiful, loving partnership. I am worthy of a partner who is kind, generous, intelligent, inspiring and thoughtful. And also, just as importantly, I am a person who is these same things for a partner.

Am I embodying these things all the time? No, and I’m striving to. I’m imperfect and I’m aware of my patterns. I’m trying my best.

I was listening to the How To Survive the End of the World podcast with adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, episode “Love: From Falling to Choosing.” , and adrienne said something I wanted to share that brought me to a reflection on an intersection of worthiness and choice in love, and loving beyond the platitude of you can’t love someone until you love yourself.

“For me so much of healing from the way the way that I learned to fall in love and the way that I’ve practiced it is that if is a choice, the first choice is actually choosing myself. And what does it mean to fall in love with myself, and to choose to love myself as I am, and to love myself in all the shaping and all the missteps and all the quirkiness and all the realities of just who I am. And my job is not to find someone else to sit at the center of my life, it’s to occupy fully the center of my life, and from that place, finding the other people who make sense to be in constellation with me in this lifetime. And so then from that place…I really have done this with friendships, it’s just looked at my friendships. Like where is mutuality actually possible? And what are the moves I make toward mutuality.

And the same thing with love. It’s like, is mutuality actually possible here? Are we both able to be responsible for how we’re showing up and for how we’re treating each other and for the ways that our trauma comes into our every day? Cuz it’s like that’s gonna all happen…I remember the first time someone said, oh, you gotta love yourself before you can love anyone else. And I was like, I don’t think that quite rings true. I think it’s more that you have to continuously love yourself as you’re loving others. Like there has to be a continuous sense of, loving myself, I’m not going to do this behavior. Loving myself I’m not going to compromise in this way. Loving myself I’m not going to hide who I truly am until we get further along into the relationship.”

For me, worthiness is in making that choice to be at the center of my own life, and to be continuously exploring what that means in my relationships, including the romantic relationship I’m in.

Worthiness is a choice. Love is a choice, an action, an intention.