The Gift of You.
Saturday, March 20th, 2010“The only gift is a portion of thyself.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some gifts only we can give to certain people. There is no other smile like ours, nobody’s touch is just the same, no one else has our thought patterns or perceptions. There are hurts in others that only we can heal, spirits that only we can lift, words that only we can say.
Self-esteem that has been chipped and weathered away by hard times robs others as well as ourselves. And always those others are the ones we love most, the very people we would least like to hurt. One of the sad implications of low self-esteem is that in devaluing who and what we are we also devalue what we have to give. So we don’t give it, and our loved ones lose out.
Putting up with low self-esteem is sad alright, but in a very real sense it’s also selfish. It isn’t honest to say “I’m only hurting myself,” when we consciously refuse to lift ourselves up out of some gutter of hopeless self-pity. If there’s even one person in the world who cares for us, who has a stake in our well-being, we are cheating that person by denying them our healthy company.
Bruised and bleeding as we may be, if someone is watching for us at a window, praying for us every night, we have more on our conscience than just the crime we’re committing against ourselves.
Unchallenged personal deterioration hurts the people who love me.