Salience

"Salience" was not a word I had heard spoken aloud before. I definitely didn't know what it meant. Before I entered college, I never wondered how important or relevant information was. I just assumed it had its merit, but every day we are surrounded by headlines and bylines promising our every wish will be fulfilled.

Some jerk gets richer every dollar we spend at the grocery store buying magazines and popular self-help books. As long as they look presentable and promise results writers make bank.

I'll admit that it's hard to feel interesting. I don't have some hot-button issue or craze to write about. Inconsequentially, I'm going to pass right through the internet without comments or readers. I'm not going to pretend I'm well versed in feminist ideology or literature. Heck, I'm not going to offer opinions on articles from websites.

I just want to share my humble opinion about what it means to be a woman and spread a positive message—something I feel too few people do.

girlVirus

A lovely find today.

The Magic of Being a Woman

The thing I often consider is having children—particularly a daughter. It was during a long road trip that I first thought about that first "Welcome to Womanhood" I might have in the future. The first thing that struck me is the difficulty of believing that being a woman is magical and empowering.

When I was twelve, I didn't believe my own mother when she told me how wonderful it is to be woman. Why would I in our society? It took me many years to start believing.

The truth is that women possess a unique energy! I've felt it so many times throughout my life but am finally aware what this energy is.

Many cultures believe that when a woman is on her moon she has more medicine in her than any man present, because she has the power to recreate and give birth to herself.

What does it mean to give birth to yourself? What does it mean to be reborn? It means that you are physically and emotionally changing from one form to another.

As women, we are cleansed and change, discarding the parts of ourselves we don't wish to carry on with.

Have you ever felt an energy at your fingertips or pulsing through you? This is the energy and magic of being a woman.

Although my future daughter may not believe me, I hope to give her all the encouragement to discover this for herself. I want her sexuality and nature to be a private and special gift. My one wish is that women could begin world wide to believe they are magical beings, capable of creating the person they truly are.

Secrets to Loving Yourself

"As the saying goes, never let yourself get too hungry, angry, lonely or tired."

When I was a child, I was loved but faced inconsistency from my parents. They divorced and involved me in a fourteen-year custody battle. My parents' mental health was also poor. One would appear and the next moment disappear. This inconsistency caused me a lot of pain.

To cope, I created multiple personalities. As my home life became more and more unstable, I turned heavily to these personalities to outlet my love, make decisions, and deal with the guilt and shame I felt surrounding my circumstances. They were tremendous help—they gave me hope and allowed me to feel in control of my life.

When I lost them, I lost the tools to cope with the ongoing issues. Loosing the personalities I'd created made it even harder going to university. I developed severe anxiety, which meant I wasn't able to connect with the people around me and my teachers.

I skipped classes and became even more out of touch. I was depressed and so unhappy I frequently thought of ending my life.

When I stopped believing in the personalities I created, I stopped being able to love myself and be happy. For the past year, all I wrote in my journal were suicide notes. I'd once had a passionate dream of becoming a writer but grew to feel useless and meaningless. I thought it'd be better to die.

Someone once told me the only reason people attempt suicide is because they want to change. I've spent the last year considering what I want to change and discovered that I don't want to die because I love myself.

While suffering from depression, I often felt disappointed in others. I felt alone in the world and wondered why, but I also realized that I would never truly be alone, because I had the capacity to love myself.

Those personalities were fragments of my true self. While I thought I hated myself and thought it'd be better to kill myself, I also thought that deep down a part of myself cared for me. I couldn't explain this understanding. It felt inaccessible to me.

Then, one night a couple months ago, I sat down and wrote a love letter to myself, radiating with love I hadn't felt in years. It was a powerful experience after only being able to write suicide notes for a year or more. And any time I'm feeling sad, I talk to myself when I'm alone in my car. I'm able to access the part of me that cares so easily now. Maybe it looks crazy, but to me it's the only time I can calm down and not feel overwhelmed.

One of the secrets to truly loving yourself is to speak to yourself in the second person. If you say, "I forgive you!" it has a completely different effect than saying "I forgive myself!" or "I forgive me!" To explain, one sounds like a request and the first sounds like the powerful reunion between friends.

The secret of loving yourself is also the secret of creating yourself and accepting the power to be multiple and infinite.

Postcard from the Volcano by Wallace Stevens

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is . . . Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Secrets to Loving Yourself

Today, I found To My Daughter, With Love: A Mother's Memory Book by Donna Green. I hadn't ever looked through it and was surprised to find a type--written letter my mother taped to the front, of course for me to read one day! It's a declaration of self-esteem and it reads:

MY DECLARATION OF SELF ESTEEM
I AM ME,
IN ALL THE WORLD, THERE IS NO ONE ELSE EXACTLY LIKE ME. THERE ARE PERSONS WHO HAVE SOME PARTS LIKE ME, BUT NO ONE ADDS UP EXACTLY LIKE ME. THEREFORE, EVERYTHING THAT COMES OUT OF ME IS AUTHENTICALLY MINE BECAUSE I ALONE CHOSE IT. I OWN EVERYTHING ABOUT ME—MY BODY, INCLUDING ALL ITS THOUGHTS AND IDEAS; MY EYES, INCLUDING THE IMAGES OF ALL THEY BEHOLD; MY FEELINGS, WHATEVER THEY MAY BE—ANGER, JOY, FRUSTRATION, LOVE, DISAPPOINTMENT, EXCITEMENT; MY MOUTH, AND ALL THE WORDS THAT COME OUT OF IT, POLITE, SWEET, OR ROUGHT, CORRECT OR INCORRECT; MY VOICE, LOUD OR SOFT; AND ALL MY ACTIONS, WHETHER THEY BE TO OTHERS OR MYSELF.
I OWN ALL MY FANTASIES; MY DREAMS, MY HOPES, MY FEARS.
I OWN ALL MY TRIUMPHS AND SUCCESSES, ALL MY FAILURES AND MISTAKES.
BECAUSE I OWN ALL OF ME, I CAN BECOME INTIMATELY ACQUAINTED WITH ME. BY SO DOING I CAN LOVE ME AND BE FRIENDLY WITH ME IN ALL MY PARTS. I CAN THEN MAKE IT POSSIBLE FOR ALL OF ME TO WORK IN MY BEST INTERESTS. I KNOW THERE ARE ASPECTS ABOUT MYSELF THAT PUZLE ME, AND OTHER ASPECTS THAT I DO NOT KNOW, BUT AS LONG AS I AM FRIENDLY AND LOVING TO MYSELF, I CAN COURAGEOUSLY AND HOPEFULLY LOOK FOR THE SOLUTIONS TO THE PUZZLES AND FOR WAYS TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT ME.
HOWEVER I LOOK AND SOUND, WHATEVER I SAY AND DO, AND WHATEVER I THINK AND FEEL AT A GIVEN MOMENT IN TIME IS ME THIS IS AUTHENTIC AND REPRESENTS WHERE I AM AT THAT MOMENT IN TIME.
WHEN I REVIEW LATER HOW I LOOKED AND SOUNDED WHEN I SAID AND DID, AND HOW I THOUGHT AND FELT, SOME PARTS MAY TURN OUT TO BE UNFITTING. I CAN DISCARD THAT WHICH IS UNFITTING, AND KEEP THAT WHICH PROVED FITTING, AND I INVENT SOMETHING NEW FOR THAT WHICH I DISCARDED.
I CAN SEE, HEAR, FEEL, THINK, SAY, AND DO. I HAVE THE TOOLS TO SURVIVE , TO BE CLOE TO OTHERS, TO BE PRODUCTIVE, AND TO MAKE SNESE AND ORDER OUT OF THE WORLD OF PEOPLE AND THINGS OUSIDE OF ME.
I OWN, AND THEREFORE, I CAN ENGINEER ME.
I AM ME AND I AM OKAY.

I wanted to share with everyone. Read it over and I hope the words resonate.

True Love

Do you believe in true love?

"True love begins when nothing is looked for in return." — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

My dad always pontificated that true love only comes after years of being together. He'd been through three failed marriages but still believed in true love. Well, he explained, someone who truly loves you will always be there. You have to work hard to be in love and it takes sacrifice. It's not the kind of sacrifice that makes you suffer—instead it leads you to happiness.

While I believe my dad, I don't think you have to be in a good or long-lasting relationship in order to experience true love. You know that your mom truly loves you. Maybe you haven't talked in years, but that doesn't change the fact that the first person you were truly in love with was your mom. It might not be romantic love, but it is true love. Not everyone goes on to experience a romantic relationship.

Beside that, how can you tell the difference between loving someone and being in love with "the one?" How can you tell you were meant to be with someone your whole life?

" Maybe true love is a decision. You know, a decision to take a chance with somebody. To give to somebody. Without worrying wether they'll give anything back. Or if they're gonna hurt you, or if they really are the one. Maybe love isn't something that happens to you. Maybe it's something you have to choose." — Love and Other Disasters

If you already made that decision, there's really nothing to worry about. Things are only as complicated as you make them.