Making you love me is too difficult a task to maintain and keep my sanity...

Making you love me is too difficult a task to maintain and keep my sanity
Alone on too many planes to identify with much else
I could fight you and still not find a reason
Breathe and be accused of personal treason
Do not make me or I will break me
Carefully molded shells that have become false compassion can easily release frustration
Do not tease it
I confess that I am easily broken
I will smash walls and then cry about the torn flesh on my knuckles
Depressed that I have caused myself so much anguish
That I have betrayed my own friendship
Stabbing pen through paper would only destroy what I have been creating
Me destroying myself
Fatal masochism •

I wrote this poem when I was 20 years old. I was so very young. Everything seems important when we are young. We have yet to learn to compartmentalize. Have yet to determine which things are important for now, and which to deal with later, and which to completely leave behind.

Finally, when we are young, we think we need love from other people. Truly, when we not only do not love ourselves, but also do not like ourselves, it is natural to feel the requirement of love from others. Not only do we have to learn to love ourselves, we also have to work to like ourselves. We must learn patience, adoration, and undying acceptance of ourselves, before we will ever begin to feel whole.

I had to travel, develop my talents, take better care of my health and appearance, and take myself out on solo dates. A couple years of practicing this, and I was well on my way to unending approval of who I was inside. A couple years of exhaustive honesty with myself about my true feelings of who I believed myself to be, and a couple years of inexhaustible positive affirmations reinforcing who I wanted myself to be, put me on track of being about to look in the mirror, and say out loud to my reflection, "I am wonderful, I have much to offer the world, I am loved, I belong, my potential is limitless"... and finally, one day, I believed myself.

I hope this helps. •

Poem from Four Years in Chrysalis
© Aisha Tariqa Abdul Haqq Publishing
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