Day 3 of Forty Days On Being A Seven, and it’s about chasing approval, and the dichotomy between doing things out of love, and doing things in order to be loved.
I know what both feel like.
In order to be loved…
Wanting love is a needy, desperate, pulling feeling. It’s a vortex, a black hole that sucks in all the love and attention and effort anyone may send over, and then it’s never enough. It’s never satisfied.
Then the very thing you crave for gets pushed away.
People can’t handle black holes, and for good reason. No one is equipped to keep giving at the amount and pace for an infinite period of time.
For their own sanity and well-being, they need to hold their own space and recover. And the moment they take time for themselves is when the black hole expands, crossing boundaries, to suck even more in.
Being in a relationship — whether love or work or family — from a place of wanting love is to be forever in a place of insecurity, of never feeling like you’re quite enough. That you have to prove somehow that you’re worthy, and yet everything you do is overlooked.
You’re chasing.
And your heart is aching. From the strain of the emptiness and from trying to get what you need.
You’ll do anything, even erase who you are, to try and fit yourself into what you think the other person wants or needs. You’ll be hyper-observant to rejection and whatever little moment of approval is shown, and absorb their thoughts, emotions, and preferences as your own.
Only unhealthy people want someone like that. Especially when the relationship is close.
Doing things in order to be loved is self-abandonment. In exchange for a smile, attention, approval, you sell your morals, values, identity and self-respect. And bit by bit you lose yourself. For a losing game, because it’s impossible to live using someone else’s perspective.
Do I sound like I know this well? Because unfortunately I spent years, maybe decades, in this state.
I’m learning to shift, to
come from a place of love and acceptance.
This is a place of giving, of having and having so much it overflows. Of grace, poise and stillness.
Coming from a place of love, there’s a sense of trust. Knowing that you’re exactly where you need to be, with the people you need to be with, and in the situation you’re supposed to be in.
And everything is right — a “life happens for you instead of to you” perspective.
Mistakes and misjudgement and uncertainty? It’s all okay. Everything makes you more of who you are, never less, and the option to change — your path, your decision, your identity — is always open. The paths are there, and it’s your free will to choose.
There’s enough time to slow down, there’s space to notice, observe, and react, and therein you’ll find the options you can choose.
And because it’s yours and your choice, you get to know yourself better and be true to who you are every step of the way.
💖🌧️
Image of an empty glass and one that’s overflowing by Peter Law from Pixabay.
