love yourself.

I want to write to everyone, I want to address the world.

I want my hands to flow freely, and for others to see the things I think and love every word let loose from my mind, but at the end of the day I am just a man behind the humble pen. I am just a man bound by ink and paper. I am just a poor soul looking for undeserving attention, looking for a way out of the cycle that continues to loop in his mind. A man trapped by his thoughts and theories and subject to the eternal speculation from within himself. I tell myself that I shouldn’t be so creative, I shouldn’t be so rebellious, or unfathomably curious.

But I am. I am human. I am good. I am bad. I am right. I am wrong. I am justice. I am corruption. I am health. I am disease. I love. I hate. I inhale. I exhale. I live. I die. I run. I crawl. I shout. I weep. I am joy. I am despair.

I am nothing.

But I am everything.

Good people, it is about time we stop telling ourselves “we aren’t good enough,” “we aren’t lovely,” “we are not worth anything.”

For heaven’s sake you are. You are good enough. I think you are lovely, I think you are worth it, all of it. And for your sake, love yourself. Love yourself more than your money, or status, or job, or beauty, or health, or future, or past. Before you can love your insecure wife, your ignorant husband, your overprotective parents, your nerve racking kids, your idiotic friends, your vicious mother-in-law, your schizophrenic uncle, your widowed aunt, your cancer ridden neighbor, or any person on the face of our dear planet, good God my dearest men and women, you have to love YOU.

You have to love you.

It’s only human to feel wanted. To feel free. To be tired of being forsaken by your thoughts and abandoned by the people you once called home. When people seem to only be passing by, people only stay until you have nothing left to give, till you have nothing left to offer, nothing left to say, nothing left to bring to the table, for every inch of good left in this world, I pray you love yourself to no speakable end. Till their words don’t matter, till their lies don’t penetrate, and their deceit turns to ash, till their hate has no place to lay its head but on the broken asphalt you have left behind.

There is no past, for it is dead. There is no future, for it has not been written in stone.

Find peace within yourself my fellow man. Love who you are, and love who you aren’t.

You are more than human, no matter what anyone tries to tell you.

To those listening…

-Gideon Reyes.