Joy in the Journey - Love in My Inbox
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
Joy in the Journey is published by Graphic Publications and appears in The Bargain Hunter and Wooster Weekly News each week.
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I sometimes find love in my inbox. Love in the form of emails waiting there for me to read. Love because someone, somewhere cared enough to email me something.
Granted, many of my emails are junk emails from Lands End, Verizon Wireless or a forward telling me to send the message onto ten people or bad things will happen to me.
Yet, when I log on to find stacks of emails, I smile and think quietly and privately to myself, “They love me!” as if receiving emails makes me feel loved and wanted.
It does. At least temporarily. And though it doesn’t make sense logically in the light of day, when my inbox is full, I feel good about myself.
I guess I want the world love me. I know, quite impossible, you must be thinking. I agree. Yet I keep on trying to be loveable to the world. And, as most people-pleasers do (back me up out there) I tend to measure my worth by how the world sees me and how the world loves me, clearly reflected in my full inbox.
But I have also lived long enough to know the world does not always love me, and that’s when I can crumble in to tiny bits of myself and lose sight of who I truly am.
But, there are advantages to getting older. I have grown more comfortable in my own skin, even though I wish it were two sizes smaller. And the world’s acceptance and love has become less important to me.
I have grown up, I guess. But inside I am still the same.
I am still the same independent ten-year-old girl who rode her bike on Fitch rode to play softball. The same stubborn thirteen-year-old girl who never gave up training for the community track meet.
The same broken sixteen-year-old girl who fell apart when her friends played a cruel joke on her at school. The same outgoing eighteen-year-old who went out of state to college and the same insecure nineteen-year-old girl who got homesick and moved back home.
Now, in the midst of middle age, I have accepted who I am, inside and out, and the reality that there are people in this world who do not love me. They probably don’t even like me very much. And that’s Ok.
My worth does not come from my inbox, not from the people around me, those I know and those I don’t yet know.
My worth comes from God. He sees me from the inside out, knows all my deepest, darkest secrets in the far depths of who I am.
And He loves me from the outside in, even with all of my imperfections.
When the world does not love me, and when I don’t even love myself very much, there is no reason to crumble in to tiny bits of myself because I am loveable…to God.
Though I may think I have found love in my inbox, I am only kidding myself. I have never felt a hug or kiss through email. Never found my worth there.
So I guess I will just live this perfectly imperfect life as a perfectly imperfect person who has learned to be comfortable in her own skin.
Even though I wish it were two sizes smaller.
Catch up with Trish at www.TrishBerg.com. Follow her on Twitter, or become her Facebook friend.
Posted by Trish Berg 5:00 AM
Labels: Joy in the Journey Column, The Bargain Hunter, Wooster Weekly News
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