Aligning with your Values.

This poem represents coming home to yourself. 

The words are so simple, yet take years and many experiences to arrive at. I think the simplicity of the words and their true meaning only hit me after I had learned what it was like to stand on either side of myself. One where I was walking in my own shadow, and the other where I had faced my shadow and been through the fire. In order to find this place, you must shed all of your old layers and be able to face yourself. There is no sense in hiding. In your darkness, you cannot see the light waiting for you on the other side, waiting to look back at you. 

To run away from these parts of you, you wish to change, you also run away from the parts of you calling you to change. The part of you that knows you most deeply is telling you to look at these parts of yourself, these parts of your life that need your attention desperately.

 That time will come when you arrive and love the person who is staring back at you. You will listen to that person so deeply, the way you would somebody else you cared to love and cherish. You realize at some point, whatever you were chasing would never feel as good as arriving home to the person that is always with you. 

That person is always standing by you, rooting for you. That person can also be the person who is constantly criticizing you, judging you, making you feel bad too. That’s why it was only after immense and year-long self-reflection that this poem made sense to me. Being my own worst critic came easier to me. It was how I was conditioned and had learned to relate to myself. 

I hadn’t even considered what type of inner voice I was using for myself at the time. This inner harsh critic was restless and relentless. I found more faults than I could tell you what I admired about myself. I did so many things well, but somehow the things that I would think about more than anything are the things I had done wrong, or not living up to my own standards in my eyes. 

It wasn’t until I realized how much of it was automatic and obsessive in a sense, that I started challenging the thoughts I was having. Because it was these thoughts that made life more difficult for me for no good reason. My looping thoughts were robbing me of precious time, and along the same line, it was robbing me of joy! I had no time to waste anymore inside my head when there were so many lovely things waiting on the outside waiting for company. 

In my own mind, and in my own heart I had to befriend myself in a new way. I had to learn to relate to myself in a way that made sense to me. In stillness, I could hear what it was that I wanted and what I needed. Not because of what others taught me, but because of my inner voice and calling. This was about more than how much I could accomplish on the outside, but rather how much I could feel joy, happiness, and self-love for myself on the inside. 

That was the real measurement of a good life for me. In my culture, the highest virtue and most respected position is becoming a wife and then a mother. Homogeneity is celebrated, and the conditioned way of life is easily understood, while all that deviates even slightly comes with immense judgment and guilt. I felt being a wife and mother to be one of the highest virtues, but they were a part of something much more. 

I did not strive to be a specific role to fit into the mold of what is most acceptable, or understood. I strived to experience as much as I humanly could so that when I did get married, or when I did have children one day, I could pass on the lessons and virtues that proved to make life more enjoyable for me. 

If I did not know how it felt like to come home to myself and feel safe there, how could I pass that on? To be your own person, who values the highest virtues through positive action and who is kind and joyful not by possessions, but by rich experiences and helping out others, that is who I see when I look into the mirror.  

LOVE AFTER LOVE
Derek Walcott


The time will come when
with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door
in your own mirror
and each will smile at the 
other's welcome and say
Sit here 
Eat. 

You will love again the 
stranger who was your self
Give wine 
Give bread 
Give back your heart 
to itself.

To the stranger
who has loved you
all your life
whom you ignored for another
who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters 
from the bookshelf

the photographs
the desperate notes.

Peel your own image from the mirror
Sit.
Feast on your life.