Yay for retreats! The annual PSF spring retreat was this past weekend at Toah Nippi in Rindge, NH. As usual, it was really good. Way to short, but good none-the-less. So I've come to a few realizations in the past few days. But there is one in particular that really hit home.

I've decided that one of the reasons why I get sad so often is that I feel like I have to be perfect. Isn't that the American way after all? To strive to perfection? But no one can be perfect, I'm certainly not. This was really reinforced when I started college and promptly got shot down in everything that I excelled in at THS. But that's real life for you. For some reason I have this mentality if it's not perfect, or really really good, then it's just absolutely terrible. Or if its not perfect, then it's not worth doing. Like singing, or soccer, or guitar, or being a Christian... which is absolutely silly I realized, but something I still can't help from feeling.

We were doing this exercise at the retreat that focused on self-love. The entire idea of this was that you can't love others if you don't first love yourself, loving your neighbors being God's great commandment (in conjuction with loving God with all your might, and all your strength...). The exercise involved writing self-affirming statements on the right side of the paper, and then on the left side write down what your raw response to this statement was. The self-affirming statement was supposed to take something that you didn't like about yourself and turn it into a positive statement. (ex: People don't like me --> I, Tara, have a great personality and people love me... you get the idea). Another thing we had to do was look at ourselves in the mirror and talk to ourselves as if we were trying to cheer up our best friends (I know it sounds cheezy, but whatever). As I was doing the latter part of this exercise, I realized that I really had nothing positive to say about myself. I don't think I'm a good singer, I'm not good enough to make it on the soccer team, I screw up so much when I play guitar in church, and I am struggling so much right now in my walk as a Christian. Sometimes I even feel like all of the cheerfulness that I exude sometimes is just fake and a cover up for what's really inside of me.

Before this becomes a complete sob story, I'll just skip ahead. The only thing that helped me calm down was repeating, "God loves me just the way I am, and that's all that matters," over and over again. And it's true. God doesn't love us because we're perfect beings. God loves us as we are with all of our faults and misgivings. I know all of this, but what I'm struggling with is really accepting it. In accepting this fact, I have to accept my own imperfections, and love myself as I am. Something that I have a really hard time doing, for one reason or another. If God can love me how I am, then I can love myself how I am, and others will love me how I am... perfections and imperfections.

Here are my faults. I don't have a lot to offer, but here I am.