A small act of loving myself: I knew love, when I knew how to love myself.

Love has always been my favorite subject. Love is what makes everything happen. I am not a learned philosopher or an expert in the area to teach or preach. I touched this subject to share my story of how I began paying attention to myself while being in love with another.

We have all (most of us) been conditioned to the concept of being “selfish” when we put ourselves ahead of others. Act of sacrifice has always been put on a pedestal. What I have understood with my experiences, is putting myself first is not being selfish. Trust me, I had to unlearn a lot of things to start believing that I am not being selfish. Sharing a small anecdotal experience from my “married” life.

Me and the dearest (read: husband) have been in “love” since I remember. I was practically a kid when I “fell” in love and we become life partners when it seemed like a good enough age to marry. Both of us have been extreme on emotions (dangerous in married couples I say). When there is affection, there is too much of it from both ends, when there is anger and frustration there is too much of it again!! Post a quarrel, the first thing we did was abandon our right to feed. And always wait for the other person to resolve the conflict before eating. From a couple of hours, the fights gradually increased to whole day affairs. And like fools, we continued this habit of not eating. He would wait for me and I would wait for him. Now, he could control his hunger well during those times but I just couldn’t. But still waited for him to resolve (I had a bigger false ego then).

I realized really late that what we were doing is the biggest crime. Punishing our body & mind. Our body & mind is our biggest responsibility in this whole wide world.

One fine day, in the midst of one of these “fights”, I decided to eat alone. Without resolving the situation. It made me feel very guilty later on (because of the conditioning, you see). After all, I love him. And he hasn’t eaten, ‘how could I?’. When he got to know after a few hours about it, it made him even angrier and decided to not eat at all and I sunk even further into the guilt. Somehow, this got resolved, my guilt faded away. Along came another argument (we were too young when we married and fought a lot ;)). Same situation. This time I didn’t starve myself and ate on time. He heard me serving food for myself, went to the kitchen and served for himself as well. And we looked at each other and laughed!!

The story might be insignificant, in the bigger picture of “love”. But, the point I am trying to make is, the act of me taking care of myself (read: loving myself) was not a selfish act. It also inspired him to be there for himself in some manner. This is when I understood, if I can’t love myself enough, can’t take care of myself, how on earth can I love another? This small change in my behavior started reflecting in all other similar things as well in my daily life.

I have started becoming more aware of my actions and thoughts towards me and can now love another as well, effortlessly with this awareness.

And if you are wondering, we still fight, once in a couple of weeks I guess, but, always have food on time together!