Love In Stillness

And in your fears, in your insecurities, in all the parts of you that you are yet to accept, in those parts you rather push away, I will always love you.

I will love you on the cold nights and quiet days, on the nights when the crickets chirp a bit too loud, on the days when you wish you can be anywhere else but here, in the moments when your mind seems to be the loudest, on the days when you can't silence the voices in your head, the days when all they have to say is you are worth nothing.  I will love you in stillness. 

And for the days you long for someone to hold you, the moment you decide nobody wants to be with you, the days your pillows are wet, and you go to bed exhausted. I will love you in stillness.

Photo Credit: Zukiman Mohamad
Source: pexels.com

Stillness: (Noun)
1.  Silence; quiet; hush.
2.  The absence of motion.

So towards the end of the year, Khadija Mbowe, a YouTuber, put up a post about loving with grace and space, and it was there I saw the phrase, love in stillness.

Love is not a new concept to me, I love love, and I love to be loved. But I find love to be one of the most challenging things out there. I am not sure why, but I have a few hypotheses; maybe it is my understanding of love, maybe it is the way I express love, maybe I don't know what love truly is, but one thing I am sure of is this, love doesn't always go my way. When it comes to love, I am always in a hurry diving headfirst and giving my all, and it ends the following ways; I get burnt by love, or I burn that feeling to the ground rather than let it be.

For a while, I struggled to accept love, why, you might ask? It is because I didn’t think I was worthy of that love. But I had love to give, and I wanted to give it all to someone. So I put it on my bucket list for that year and loved someone. That was when I learnt love can be consuming. I found it hard to keep loving when I ran out of myself and realized I didn't love myself to start with. Love left me broken. The next line of action was to turn love inwards and learn to love me, and slowly I did. I learnt to give myself grace for all I could not be, for the mistakes I made, for my desperation for validation and for allowing myself to believe I needed permission from others to love myself.

Somehow, though, in this journey, I am still not fully accepting of love that is not my own and when I fell in love again, I wasn't looking for it. It took me a while to admit to myself that I might have fallen in love, all I thought of was how unworthy I might be to love someone so wonderful when I felt less than. Don't get me wrong, I love myself now, or I am learning to, but you need to know there are still insecurities I am dealing with and trying to work on, there is the understanding that I can do better with the way I talk to others. Maybe my problem is that I see too much of my faults and think it is unfair to expect someone to love me that way, and now I burn whatever looks like love to the ground.  I still cannot explain how I got here, and I don’t know if this is a step in the right direction. One thing I am certain of is this, I will not beg to be loved, not again.

Stillness on the other hand is a concept I am not familiar with. I always want to be in motion, and it is hard to keep myself, my mind quiet. I find ways to distract myself, ways to keep myself in motion, and I was told right from when I was born, I have always been running from one thing to the next. This year, though, I have one main goal and that is to be still. I am still looking for solitude, and I am declaring that this year is going to be a personal retreat. I hope to return to my core and find answers that eluded me last year.

I want to learn how to love with grace and space. I believe I hold on too tightly to human relationships. I started sabotaging my friendships at some point because of the fear of losing them and in the process losing parts of myself that I defined by them. And when I read Khadija's post, it resonated with me. Aside from learning to be still, I want to learn how to love in stillness. I want to love myself with grace and space. I want to learn to love myself in the space where I fail, the grace to understand that maybe it is not always about me. I want to learn to love myself when I feel sad and defeated, I want to learn to be still and understand that perfection is not always possible.

To my friends this year, the ones I will give almost everything to, the ones I define parts of myself by, I want to learn to love them in stillness. I want to learn to love them in the space that it takes to get a reply from their messages without being scared that they are beginning to say goodbye. I want to learn to love them in the space they need to make other friends without being scared that I am being replaced. I want to learn to love them with grace because I know medical school can be demanding, and they are on their way to better things. I want to love them with grace and in the space needed for them to become who they are meant to be. I want to love them in the stillness that would remain when we finally go our separate ways.

And I want to be loved also in that space and with grace. I want to be loved in stillness. And when we are on our way out, when we no longer hear the crickets chirp, when the silence becomes deafening, and it says all we failed to tell each other, when we can't return to whom we used to be, when we can no longer be on the same page, when I become just a memory, I hope you love me with grace and space.

Atticus Poetry
source: favim.com

How do you want to be loved?
Intentionally, genuinely.
Where do you want to be loved?
Right here in stillness.

I hope you have an amazing week.

With all the love in my heart,

The Estherian