Day 15 – 02/06/2026

It’s been a few days since my last kind of mental break…where I sunk back into a looping mess, tangled in a vine of self hatred. I think a lot of this is obviously unresolved trauma from my past…never truly feeling worthy enough from my father or mother…not to say that they weren’t great parents, they did their best with what they could. A single mother raising multiple kids is no easy task, and I couldn’t fathom the burden she was carrying…to just try and give us a life where we felt like we could succeed.

I only learned part of it from the loss of my father…grief…I’m thinking I’m beginning to realize I might have mistaken the two…or maybe I just thought if you were able to grieve over someone or feel loss that must have meant you loved them…and maybe that’s true…but when they were here…alive…or next to me…was it love that I felt…what even is that feeling?

The other part of the love I learned from my mother…who shouldered the burden of caring for her loved ones by staying strong…not showing her emotions too outwardly because she didn’t want her kids to worry…for me to worry…but by shouldering that burden on herself…to put food on the table…to get us to our practices or pick us up from school…we usually had to survive on our own from then on…we didn’t know how to regulate our emotions…so it showed up as outbursts…cries for attention…self soothing…regulation techniques that weren’t healthy…coping mechanisms that if turned to addiction could become destructive…

I never truly felt what it meant to truly love or be loved…at least not completely…it was foreign to me as a child…it was like a I had a couple patches of a quilt that I would stick in my pocket and look at or hold onto…but was never able to fully be embraced or warmed by it…

I imagine the feeling of love might be more akin to the ability to connect with your own self, your own emotions, and connect with the emotions of others…to empathize…to be able to step outside of ones self…From navigating some of the love languages I know that I feel most seen and connected when I’m spending time with others, connecting, emotionally, physically. When we are able to laugh with one another, give each words of inspiration, affirmation, appreciation…in those moments…the world melts away…I feel at peace…maybe that is what love is…in a truer sense…peace. Finding peace…not to say that I need to be happy to feel love…because even in some of the darkest moments of my life, through the sadness I still felt loved by my siblings…most of the time it was just a fleeting moment when I was a kid…but as an adult…when the pain I’ve been through…I can see that they truly are there for me…busy…but there. All I need to do is reach out…which is hard because I’ve rarely done it…I’ve almost exclusively have been a lone wolf…but I’ve never truly wanted to be…

I feel as if I am connected with my emotions…I’ve just never really have had an outlet in which I felt safe…to feel heard…seen…she helped me feel seen at times…but I think the deeper wound inside me is that I didn’t truly love myself…My boundaries folded quickly…even boundaries I set up for myself to follow…boundaries I set for others could easily be torn down or not respected…which of course would make me feel angry but…not rage…irritation at most…resentment maybe slowly building…resentment towards myself for believing I was weak…but in reality…I’m more so just lost…

I also have started to acknowledge the emotional burden I may have placed…on myself…Wishing to be seen…I’d start to shutdown…maybe even disassociate because I was so overwhelmed…in which I’d start beating myself up…and then I was no longer even there for myself…I’d tell myself well maybe time will heal this wound…to my knowledge its definitely healed everything else…but I think I’ve finally began to realize that time without any effort…is just delaying the pain that’s needed to be worked on…time passing by at the speed of light to the point to where my memories became a dense fog…dates mixed…chores I told myself I would do would get pushed back…I was sedating myself from feeling the truth…that I was in pain…that I was beginning to resent myself…that I was becoming complacent…no…I was complacent.

I think a true sense of love for one’s self is giving yourself grace…doing the small things for yourself…the progress you make to heal your own heart…acknowledging that you and your emotions are valid…that it’s okay to have them…to not feel shame about them…but also acknowledging that you can’t just be aware…you have to be proactive…I think that’s what love is…awareness of ones self…awareness of those around you…both lover, friend, stranger…and to be proactive for yourself…to meet your own needs, but also to be proactive and try your best to meet the needs of others…not to obsess over their needs…but to try your best. To not neglect yourself. To not neglect them. I also believe that loving one’s self means having healthy boundaries with yourself…not trying to give people everything they “want” not giving yourself everything you “want” because there’s a quite a big difference between our wants and needs as people…

I may very well be wrong in a lot this…but at least I’m starting to feel some love for myself…not afraid to make mistakes, maybe a little afraid to take larger risks in life…but that’s for another time.