Validation: You are loved
"Close-up of a feather in all its fractal glory"
Title: Owl Feather #3 (from series "Geometric Iridescent")
c-print
22" x 15"
2023
I often find myself getting caught up in a certain kind of yearning; a neediness to receive more from others in the form of external validation. I act as though I need to be told I’m ok and that I am loved. What’s funny about this is I can know that the only validation I need comes from within - that all I have to do is give myself the love I need and that all will be well. I can even get pretty good at practicing this, but that doesn’t mean the old wounding just goes away. I’ve gained space from it, or, rather, I’ve expanded well beyond it, but it doesn’t mean it’s gone. The point is not to get rid of our hang-ups, triggers, short-comings, or flaws, the point is to learn to love them enough that we rise above them and release our mutual grip from each other, no longer being ruled by each other. I may no longer live a life ruled by the need for validation from others - becoming hopelessly depressed, angry, and resentful for the long lapses of time between compliments - but I still feel it show up when I’m at my most vulnerable. These days, we’re all feeling pretty vulnerable, I have no doubt.
I try to find comfort in the idea that I am not perfect and none of us are. I tell myself I do not wish to be perfect. Then I wonder - what is perfect? Isn’t it just some ideal in various social human patterning? If I sit in my heart and enter the present moment fully - breathing a sigh of relief in my arriving - I realize I am my ideal. Right here, right now, in this moment, I feel my abundant love for myself and everything that is. All is well, all is perfect - even in its horror, the “horrible beauty” of it all - I see its perfection.
So, I guess I am perfect. I am. I am my perfect. And that is enough. I don’t need to be anyone else’s perfect. Right?
As my thinking starts to spin again it groans that “I long to be someone else’s perfect.” A moment shy of not having the thought automatically kick in (from years of practice, of course), I see on the other side that the external validation I seek is one of the mirror showing me and telling me that I am ok and that I am loved. The world is my mirror - do I not see I’m ok in its reflection? Do i not see I’m loved? What is showing me I’m not? Media, social media? Yep - I know that to be true in my experience.
So what is the balance between the reflections of the world, the external narrative I pick up, and the truth?
I use this as an exercise not just to tell myself how much I love me, but imagining receiving it from a loved one and telling it to a loved one - the beloved (for me, Eric).
I love you. I love you not because of anything. I love you not because I have to, not because of the actions you choose, the words you speak, or anything you feel you can enact in order to affect some kind of shift in how I perceive you, how I love you. The love is the same. The love is what remains when your body utterly wastes away. The love is what remains when your mind no longer cooperates with this reality. The love is what remains when we are apart. You can do or be anything in any amount and it would have no repercussions on my love for you.
Love just is.
I loved you long before I met you and I will love you long after I forget you.
I know a part of you wants to earn my love, for it to have merit, for it to be singular and special, but it just doesn’t work that way, my darling. Love just is. Love has no condition. It is everyone and always, it is full, and it is empty.
We, however, get to come here, in bodies, in the illusion of individuation, the illusion of separateness, and practice love in billions and billions of different ways.
You are special. But that is not the love. There is no why to love. There is no why to love.
I love you because we are here together on this Earth plane. It could have been different in any given way, but it is this right now. It is you and me and all our funny little quirks. I love you here and now and, yes, always. And I always have. And I always will.
Isn’t that wonderful?
You are loved!
Forever, inherently, stupendously
loved.
I am so grateful for my life, no matter what it may look like, no matter how anyone else feels about it, no matter how little I do, how little I achieve, how much I rush or run around, how much or how often I stay present and in my heart… dropping all judgments of my old world and all judgments of my new one. My life is beautiful. I am grateful for all of it, just as it is, just as it has been, just as it will be.
I’ve placed 90% of judgments on myself since my initial programming - programming that ran automatically after download - which is to say that I have done most of the heavy lifting. I have been a good student in the school of “and now it’s your turn to beat yourself up for few decades!” Unlearning that takes time. It is a process. And while I unravel the old and weave in the new lines of code, there is an integration period. I am a student of my own integration - holding space for myself to reboot with a new system in place, one which uses a completely different interface and design. It will take time, but it will be well worth it. A gorgeous new hybrid of human and soul, ancient and emerging anew.
I forgive all 90% of the me that judges me. I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
And the 10% of judgments that came from others were mostly one-offs that I adopted as truth for me and my life.
I forgive that as well.
I am not perfect. Whatever that means. I am who I dreamed of, whom I’m dreaming of, and deep down she remembers that.
And is delighted.
All part of the design. Thank god for that. Thank you!