Declaration of Self Worth
Weep and heal, my friend, weep and heal. And, as you weep, anoint me with the tears that wash away your pain, that I, too, may take the healing you pour into your weeping.
We have allowed the leaches to bleed us dry, for fear of losing what we never had.
We have listened until mesmerised by the words that proclaim our inadequacies in the eyes of another. We have screamed in silent agony at the withdrawal of conditional love whose requirements we can no longer satisfy. We have shaken in misery at the prospect of losing love that was not love.
We have been fashioned in the same furnace, you and I. We have held the same pain in our hearts, giving until we can give no more. We have faced the same dark pit of depression and learned slowly and painfully to drag ourselves up its rocky walls. We have emerged from the edge with bleeding hands and knees, but stronger, much stronger in the knowledge that we are survivors.
We have recognised that without unconditional love, there is no life worth clinging to. We have contemplated death in the face of loneliness. We have reached beyond the limits of endurance and known the angels stoop to carry us when we can walk no more. We have sat in silent meditation and confronted lives of transparent emptiness for future decades that we believe we cannot endure.
We have acknowledged our own fault-line cracks, confronted our own weaknesses and declared them to be intrinsic to our humanity. We have asserted our need, our right to be loved for who we are, not for what we give or for how effectively we transform ourselves into that which the object of our love would have us be.
We are resolute: no more will we cut our hands and feet as we dance around the altar of another’s whims in forlorn hope that our Deity will come to ignite the sacrifice. No more will we throw the children of our own undeveloped aspirations into the volcanoes of appeasement to placate the angry gods and goddesses.
We have taken the surgeon’s knife of separation to the cancer of co-dependency in a final act of self-absolution.
We will no longer supplicate with the congregations of the acquiescent that worship in the cathedrals of self-deprecation.
We have determined that NOW, is the time to rise, that NOW, we shall reach for the light, that NOW, we shall claim our birth right in the grace of new intimacy, that NOW, we shall lay hold of the promise of infusing joy.
We are the survivors of love grown cold.
We have learned that we are worthy.
