2.24.23 // "Selfless"

I've been taught to be selfless.
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Watching my mom and other female role models growing up, attending a catholic high school, and consistently being told, taught, scolded, and expected to fit neatly within gendered societal roles. I internalized that in order to be "feminine" the ultimate act is selflessness, to be a caregiver, and that to exude love you have to put others first.
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This belief is incredibly damaging, and for the first time in my life, I see that it's not true. I was groomed to be a people-pleaser, a quiet "do-gooder," a soldier of the patriarchy, and a docile wife-to-be.
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But selflessness is not love, it is self-sabotage, it is self-hate. Because selflessness, in my experience, takes your further from yourself and builds your being around others, it asks that you lose yourself in order to serve others.
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There is a way of loving and serving that doesn't come at the cost of yourself. But that isn't selflessness. Trading yourself for others as if there is only room for one is a rumor, it is misleading, and it's the black-and-white thinking that costs women their waking lives.
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It's heart-wrenching when you finally step back and see, the patterns, the roles, the expectations, the confirmation we are thrust into and sold as "sexy" but those chains take us further away from ourselves, further away from where confidence, happiness, and true love really live.
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Then we are taught to fear if we attempt to break those chains. We are taught that if we aren't selfless and giving, no one will love us, we are "selfish," and that abundance will never arise out of that prioritization of self.
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What a lie...
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To be yourself and to fill yourself first with kindness, love, and truth is a damn gift to the world around you. It unlocks yourself, it has you reaching for yourself first. And if you're meeting your needs, wants, desires, and holding yourself in your fears and sadness, then you create the best version of yourself to share. That is love.
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When you are bursting at the seams of radical self-love, that love can't help but pour over onto others. Not only do others get to taste the overflowing cup of love that stems from yourself, but you also teach others, especially other women, that you can be first in action, in life, and even in your mind, and that is the ultimate unlocking. The shift our society desperately needs.
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Because being selfless is self-sabotage and masks who you really are, and the world doesn't need more masks, it needs you.