I love.....me.

{ Eat Pray Love } I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything... If I love you, I will carry you for all your pain. I will assume for you all your debts. I will protect you from your own insecurity. I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself... I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give all this and more, until I get exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated by someone else.

As I have journeyed through life, I have discovered that I consume myself in love. I love to love and I love to be loved. Is this so bad? No. But when the definition of who I am has become lost with who I am with, than yes, this is a problem. I have found that since the age of fifteen, I have been a devoted girlfriend, always going from one boy to the next, giving them my all. All of a sudden, the relationship(s) I have been in have become my identity. I gave up my needs and wants for theirs so that the relationship would grow... so I would be loved. What is that saying... 'You can't fully love someone unless you love yourself first?' Within the last couple of years, I really did lose that self love, which was replaced with the love I had for someone else.

{ Eat Pray Love } So be lonely. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience....

Yes, being a single mom has its lonely times. But these are the times I am going to embrace and love. This is MY time. This is MY time to grow and discover and become the BEST ME I can be. I need this time to really get up close and personal with my soul and build a relationship with this universe. I need this time to to figure out what I really look like and talk like when I am not trying to merge with someone else. This is MY time to discover ME.

xoxo, Alex