Love

Why are so many people afraid of love?  Why do so many people not know what it is or how to love properly?  Why have so many people been so hurt by love that they refuse to accept it or let it in?  Love is who we are.  Love is where we come from.  Love is where we will return when we die.  I know that it is not easy to love.  I have struggled with it.  I have given the best parts of me to people who did not know how to love me in return or accept the love that I offered.  I carried a lot of blame for that.

When love presented itself to me in its truest, purest form, I didn’t know how to accept it.  After all the talking I had done to myself about what I would do when the right type of love came along, I bombed at it spectacularly.  The lesson I learned from that failure, shaped the biggest journey I have ever taken in my life, which was to truly learn how to love myself, to fall in love with Chere Roshawn Hampton, something I had never done in my life.  I was always busy loving someone else, looking to care for someone else, doing any and everything to avoid me.  Learning to love myself has not been easy.  It has taken me by surprise at how foreign a concept it was.  I have learned a lot about myself on this journey.  I have learned to take myself out on dates.  I have learned how to spend time with myself and enjoy my own company.  I know that by doing this work, it will make me ready to receive love when it returns to me.  I will be ready to get it right.  More importantly, I will always have my own love if anyone else’s doesn’t measure up.  That’s the blessing in the lesson.

Instead of hopping from relationship to relationship, wondering why things never work, it’s good to take a step back and spend some time with yourself.  Heal your wounds.  Love on yourself for a while.  What is meant for you will come.  That may take some time.  It will serve a greater purpose for you in the end. You have to learn to love yourself and figure out what you want.  It will be some of the hardest work you will ever do in your life, but it is rewarding.  You discover the beauty in yourself.  Something that you have in you all along. You just have to pay attention.

Truth

It is hard to be wide awake right now in this country.  It’s hard to see what’s going on and then watch other people ignore it or justify it with “alternative facts,” that have nothing at all to do with the truth of their actions.  Some people will bend over backwards to get behind a lie, to keep from having to accept the truth.  This is not a moment to stick your head in the sand or turn a blind eye to the events of the world.

I will not lie and say that I am not worried.  I worry about the suffering that people will experience as a result of this new regime.  I have never indulged in the world with rose-colored glasses on.  I have always seen the harsh reality of the way that this world is.  In light of these events, I have decided that to use my voice, in writing or speaking, will be an act of revolution.  In a world where I am likely to be discounted anyway because of my Black, female, lesbian identity, I am going to make my presence felt by using the very gifts God gave me.  I am going to write every chance that I get, about everything that I see.  I will write to give voice to those who have been silenced.  I will rise, like the mountain that I am, and protect those who need to be protected.  I will fight for all that need to be fought for.

How will you rise to the challenge?  Will you accept what is being fed to you or will you seek the truth?  Will you tow the party line or will you take a step out on faith?  I’m going to turn a mirror on the world and make it face its ugly reflection.  There’s beauty in the ugliness of truth.  I hope that it will save us all.