I was watching a movie that I had not seen in a few years and as I remembered some of the scenes that were playing out, I had to stop after hearing a line from one of the characters that I couldn’t recall. The person stated, “we accept the love we think we deserve”. This made me pause as I reflected for several minutes about what they were saying. It was a teacher speaking to a student and he went on to explain further. To him it meant that people tend to end up in relationships where they are treated as well or as poorly as they believe they merit. If someone thinks they are undeserving of real love and affection, they may accept a toxic or abusive partner instead. The quote suggests we must believe we deserve goodness before we can have it. This was quite deep and yet, as I thought about the first time I possibly heard about love, as a very young person I did not have any sense of fully describing what that meant to me. That is because there are no biases or other learned behavior due to having that pure innocence that slowly starts peeling away from us in layers as we get older. It further made me think about the things that we believe we deserve beyond the feeling of love, affection or other emotional connections. How often do we ask ourselves about what we deserve and then follow it up with why haven’t we received that yet? I suspect that as an adult with lots of learned behavior which comes through life’s experiences, we get to these instances where we take inventory of what we have achieved and look at what other things we believe we still can add to our list of accomplishments. Having self-awareness of oneself is quite helpful to quickly assess what are our attributes that can still help us achieve our next conquest. In addition, we can also look at any of our areas of improvement that may still need some work to help add more polish to us. Whether you aspire to obtain a new job, seek to finally lose the weight you have spoken about or perhaps want to achieve a different level of financial freedom, there is always some work to be done in order to accomplish any of it. Also, if you grew up without a lot of reinforcement about your self-esteem, self-worth or lacked nurturing, take the time to unpack some of this if it still exists within you. What I have learned throughout my life, is that there are multitudes of stories that I have been a witness to, where some folks had to grow up more quickly than others. Due to the home circumstances that were not ideal for some growing children, this could definitely have created some lack of self-esteem as part of that effect. Therefore, the beginning was lacking of many things including loving support for some. When we get to adulthood is where we finally get to choose how we are going to live the next part of our life, while we can also decide to let go of some of that baggage that doesn’t serve a positive purpose. Most of what I have witnessed, was people choosing to live as survivors and not victims of any of what they encountered as children. The great part about making decisions as an adult, is that you do not have to repeat what you experienced as a young person, especially if it was a negative incident. Choosing to live out the rest of your life with a new perspective, filled with positive plans on your next potential achievements breathes new life into us and gives us a new meaningful purpose as we set afoot on these new ventures that now await us. I hope that you all feel that you deserve better and that you continue to work towards achieving your next goal whatever that may be. In doing so, remember to share your experiences with others so that we can help our counterparts grow via what we have already experienced and hopefully, we also can prevent others from making any decisions that may have negative consequences as well, by utilizing us as living examples.
