Find someone who can handle your darkest truths, who don’t change the subject when you share your pain, or try to make you feel bad for feeling bad.
Find someone who understands we all struggle, some of us more than others, and that there’s no weakness in admitting it. In fact, few things take as much strength.
Find someone who wants to be real, however that looks and feels, and who wants you to be real, too.
Find someone who gets that life is hard, and who gets that life is also beautiful, and who aren’t afraid to honor both those realities.
Find someone who helps you feel more at home in your heart, mind, and body, and who take joy in your joy. Find someone who loves you, for real, and who accepts you, for real, just as you are.
EXCERPT FROM THE VELVETEEN RABBIT
~ By Margery Williams ~
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
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