The End of You.
It’s a human need to feel connected to someone else, and most of the time, those connections are the source of the greatest joys in life.
Some very special friends of ours just had their first child this morning, and will soon be experiencing the overwhelming joy and terror that is taking your baby home for the first time, and wallowing in the incredible love and connection you have for the new life that has been entrusted to you.
Even when you are so tired that you can sleep standing up 🙂
As a source of connection, the bond of a parent to a child is usually only eclipsed by the relationship between two people who love each other romantically.
In a dance that has been repeated throughout nature since the beginning of time, we give of ourselves into that relationship and hopefully feel the resonance of their soul with ours, each other strengthening, and taking strength from, the other.
Almost like we become one together.
Which sounds like a wonderful idea, and might be, if it really happened. In reality though, we never truly become one with anyone else, and that’s probably a good thing, because to do so would give up the most essential component of both our consciousness and our humanity...our responsibility to be ourselves, to look after ourselves and to care for ourselves.
And to be separate from anyone else.
Too many times I see relationships that have strayed into a place where one or both of the people involved is either giving too much to the relationship, or trying to take too much out of the relationship.
This could be a parent who needs their child to be/act a certain way in order to feel ‘accomplished’ or ‘worthy’ as a parent, or a romantic partner who needs their significant other to prop up their own emotional needs at the cost of that partner’s health, sanity and well-being.
Neither of these situations are good for any of the people involved.
Conversely, it could be a person who has given so much of themselves trying to fulfill a partner who can never be made whole until they do the work needed on themselves, or a child who tries over and over again to become the person their parent needs them to be, weakening their sense of self in pursuit of an acceptance that should have been given without conditions.
In this, I do not intend to assign blame, because blame is the refuge of the immature and the hurt. Both are to be pitied, and loved into a higher state of being.
One of the greatest steps you’ll ever take in your journey on this earth is to realize that you are your own person, and so is everyone else. When you come to understand that your emotional well-being, your sense of self, and your happiness are independent of anyone else’s choices, you begin the journey of becoming the truest expression of you that you can ever be.
Knowing where you begin, and end, allows you the freedom to be who you were born to be, and also grants unto you the ability to gift that freedom to others.
Because only when you are truly free of need from someone can you freely give of yourself to them.
— Dr. Alan Barnes
@maddrbmusings