I don’t tend to write about Valentine’s Day because I find it to be one of the most commercial, forced, generated “holidays” out there—along with Sweetest Day.  I love love, I love the idea of celebrating love, I love the idea of showing love whether it’s platonic, romantic, familial, spiritual, kindred, whatever it may be.  Love is a REAL thing and I truly believe it’s an element that can shape and change the world.  As a kid I loved celebrating Valentine’s Day because it seemed like the day we were made entirely aware of those who cared about us and that we were valued.  I thought it meant something to share that kind of appreciation with all of those around us.  Truthfully, there is still value if not necessity to share that type of appreciation but I don’t feel we need a single day to do that, a single extravagant day to break the bank and put pressure on creating a perfect scenario to show we love someone.  It’s been years since I truly researched anything about the day and, like most events in history, there are many stories pertaining to its origin ranging from fertility festivals with ritual sacrifices to the execution of men named Valentine under Emperor Claudius to an imprisoned priest falling in love with a jailer’s daughter.  The story gets skewed with the telephone game of history so the point is this: why do we need one specific day to show love and appreciation for those we love?  Why do we need to make such a spectacle of a very natural and very special thing like the relationships between people?  Why do we choose to forget the bigger scope of what the emotion of love can do and focus on putting pressure on it? Frankly, why do we do that for everything in our lives?

These are questions I don’t have the answers for but I know that as time has gone on and humans have evolved, we have learned to take very special things and almost make a mockery of them with pressure and unnecessary pomp and circumstance. I believe in making things special but I don’t believe in mass marketing and manufacturing an emotion.  Commercializing and capitalizing on an emotion is a manipulative and damn near savage thing to do.  To create the type of pressure and mental strain that makes people feel alone if they aren’t paired by a specific date is so far from the concept of love.  Love is a special thing and to understand that, we need to understand what it is to love ourselves.  In this hugely digital age we are starting to get the message of what it means to love ourselves—not the kind of love that means spending thousands of dollars to look a certain way or to spend a spa day or buy a specific product.  We are talking of the real need to appreciate the core of who we are and how to cultivate that into something special.  I’ve said it before but it stands to reason that when we learn to love ourselves, we finally understand what it is to love anything else.  The concept of love isn’t crazy, it’s a necessity.  It truly is love that makes us consider our actions towards others and our environment.  It’s love that makes us see the bigger scope of possibility in the universe.  It’s love that makes us treat the things around us with care and respect.  It’s love that helps things grow.  It’s love that forces us to slow down and appreciate and really FEEL the little things that matter in life.  Those feelings are things we could never manufacture or buy—yet we are so desperate for those feelings we think we could buy them.

The ironic part is we treat relationships like a spectacle as well and this is the other side of not knowing how to truly love ourselves. If we treat others like disposable options we start looking for ways to make ourselves feel valuable rather than cultivate our natural talents and authentic state.  We live wearing a constant mask and that type of hiding will never show the reality of who we are.  If we don’t show who we are how can we ever express our authenticity?  We only express our authenticity when we feel safe and that type of safety can’t be manufactured or found in anything outside of ourselves.  The full breadth of our creativity must be cultivated and appreciated from the inside out.  IT ironic thing about the latter fact and the concept of a holiday like Valentine’s day is that we rarely show those true facets of ourselves to the world because we’re so afraid we won’t be accepted—and if we aren’t showing our real selves, how can our real selves ever be truly loved?  Perhaps it’s part of getting older and being ready to strip away the veil of fakeness and pressure we put on ourselves.  Perhaps it’s getting older and finally truly being tired of having to wear a mask myself.  It wasn’t until I started making choices and moves for myself last year that I truly stepped into some semblance of who I am and understood that THAT is the version of me that I want to appreciate and share with the world.  So this isn’t to dismiss or devalue the concept of love, this is about understanding what love really is and what it really takes.  True love starts with loving ourselves enough to express our authenticity and dive into the joy that brings.  When we learn how to love ourselves, loving everything else is easy—and we don’t need a holiday to show that. So celebrate today by digging a little deeper into who we are and letting that light shine a little brighter.  That’s how loving ourselves changes the world.