On "love"
by Penelope North
Love. These four letters can mean so much - or so little - to a person. Some people throw around the word “love” like the words hello or goodbye. “Okay, bye, love you!” I’ve heard countless times when hanging up the phone with a friend or leaving a party. For some, it’s easy, almost instinctual, to give and profess their love. For others, love is a tricky, weighted word that doesn’t roll naturally off the tongue.
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Personally, I think love is universally complex, regardless of how easy some may be able to feel, spread, or say it. The “I love you”s we pass onto our friends are not the same that we give to our parents, siblings, romantic partners, or even dogs.
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When you think of the primary recipients of your love, who comes to mind? Seriously, list them out in your head.
How far down your list is your own name?
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Too often, we forget that self-love is a way to extend our ability to love others, filling our cups so that the love in it can run over for someone else. We forget that love starts from within. How you speak and perceive yourself influences how you engage with the world and others. I view self-love as an integral practice and not-so-secret key to embracing deeper, more meaningful interactions in everyday life. By being able to truly see, accept, and care for myself fully, I can leave my house each day loaded with empathy for others.
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After all: “Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love” - Leo Tolstoy
At Duke, I have the lucky chance to take a class on gratitude. This week, we were tasked with writing a list of things we love. The exercise kept my mind stirring before I even put pen to paper, because the list felt endless. I loved everything within my peripheral view, everyone that I had interacted with that day.
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Some of my answers were frivolous.
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I love sing-alongs. I love belting Wicked in the kitchen with my friends who love musical theater as much as I do.
I love when my playlist matches the weather outside, especially on a bright and sunny day, and I can walk or run to the beat of the songs.
I love how baking makes the whole house smell like cinnamon sugar. I love how my mom tells me no baking, but will still eat what I go ahead and make anyway.
I love working in coffee shops, and I love when they serve the coffee in big homey mugs even more.
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Some are a looking glass into how I experience the world.
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I love life, the big and the little things. I love reminding myself that life is meant to be lived and loved, and choosing to focus on what's good and abundant each day.
I love giving thoughtful gifts to my friends on their good days and bad, but I love my friends who bring me flowers on a random Sunday morning even more.
I love that my family is one with yearly traditions, and I love the idea of getting to pass these onto a family of my own one day even more.
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But it was only after my single-spaced list spilled onto a second page that I realized everything I had written was outside of myself. When thinking of what I truly love, I had an armory of people, places, and moments that came quickly and easily to mind. It was attributes about myself that caused me to fall short. In my seven and a half semesters of engineering homework, this was the first time an assignment forced me to analyze my relationship with myself.
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My own journey with self-love has been anything but linear, especially in college. The past four years have forced me to grow out of the box that both shaped and contained my existence for the first 18 years of my life. With growth comes change, and with change comes the choice to either accept the new circumstances or dwell on the way things used to be. I have returned (intentionally or not) to this crossroads countless times throughout college. So many times, I find my mind wandering back to how things were freshman, sophomore, junior year — who my friends were, how hard my classes were, the way I looked. It took me too long to hear the advice that I now hold close to my chest anytime I find myself in this mental drifting state: If you want to revert back to that old version of yourself, even just to change one thing to the way it was back then, would you be willing to give up everything you have now?
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Maybe you wish you had sophomore year you’s mile time or freshman year you’s endless ability to say “yes” to every night out, dinner invitation, or new room full of strangers in hopes that you’d find your next college best friend. But if you wish you could go back and have that one piece of your old self, then you’d have to take every part of them with it, too. Would you trade your entire life now for your entire life then?
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The moral of the story is that I learned that life is not a la carte, and neither is self-love. I can’t pick the things I don’t love about myself and trade them out one-by-one like a Fantasy Football pick. Self-love requires full acceptance. Not to say that it’s easy; if anything, it makes the practice harder. You have to force yourself to face those little things you may not like about yourself and learn to accept that they are a part of who you are. And those things that you do like (and hopefully love) about yourself? They wouldn’t exist without their complements.
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Maya Angelou once said something remarkable about this: “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” In my 22 years of life, I can’t say I have ever heard anyone compliment the beauty of a caterpillar or their cocoon — only the greatness of the butterfly that came from it. When you begin to realize that everything you have now is the result of the small, yet powerful changes made by a past version of you, you now have the seeds of gratitude, acceptance, and compassion to plant your own tree of self-love. Remember when you wanted what you had now? Remind yourself of how lucky you are to have your feet exactly where they are on this very ground and how your past steps over the peaks and through the valleys of your life got you here.
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Back to the “I love exercise:” After veering off task for some self-reflection on love, I came back to my list, determined to include myself. I sat staring at the red wooden back of the barn outside my window, as the 4 p.m. sun started to melt down the horizon and scatter golden light around me. What do I love about myself?
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Self-love doesn't have to be literally high fiving yourself in the mirror or patting yourself on the back. All it really takes is an openness to self-reflection, a bit of mental effort, and a whole lot of intention to see just how much you are doing on any given day and how well you are doing it. Sometimes, it’s as small as telling yourself, “I need to give myself more credit for how hard I’m trying,” when you look in the mirror in the morning. It could be thanking yourself for choosing the path with more resistance, not snoozing your alarm and getting up to workout first thing in the morning. It could be treating yourself to a solo dessert date, because let’s be honest, you haven’t stopped thinking about frozen yogurt this whole week.
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My mom always says, “you have to be your own biggest advocate,” and while I believe that to be true, I also think that sentence can be extended: “You have to be your own biggest advocate, fan, and cheerleader.” Buying into yourself, your whole self, flaws and quirks and strengths and weaknesses, is the best gift you can give to yourself and others, because by filling up your internal cup with self-love and compassion, you now have an abundant pool to pour from in interactions with best friends, loved ones, and even strangers. And I think we can all admit we could use an extra boost of kindness (both to give and receive) in each of our days.
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Gratitude class that week was a bit different. Normally, we’re all sharing and expressing appreciation for the things and people around us. And as each of the 16 people in the classroom went around and read their “I love” list aloud, it seemed like everyone had interpreted the assignment just as I had at the beginning – bullet after bullet of the things and people that have made me happy recently. Actually, only one person other than myself listed something they love about themselves (their answer: their big heart).. When I told my professor – who’s also my friend – about my recent ruminations on self-love, she decided to change the exercise to include this dimension of love, realizing also for the first time how often it is overlooked.
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After each of us presented our lists, the room still teeming with warm energy and reminders of the good things about humanity, the slideshow changed.
It read, “What is one thing you love about yourself?”
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The circle went around again, but this time, there was a different air to each person’s voice. A sweetness and gentleness, a flavor of vulnerability not previously there in their lists of love. I now realize it was that openness to self-reflection, a first step towards self-love, that the question had cracked open in each person around me. How remarkable – that I get to be a part of and inspire another’s journey toward a happier, kinder, more loving life.
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Oh, and my personal additions to my “I love” list?
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I love my body’s ability to do hard things, but I love my mind’s willingness to try them even more.
I love that I choose to love myself, even on days when it's harder than usual, because I have the awareness that I can’t pour from an empty cup.
I love myself for getting up each day and trying to make it 1% better than the last.