Lately, I’ve found myself wanting things and people that at my core I don’t even want, and these Quarantine times we live in are just making it more of an issue. For example, wasting money on clothes and shoes and who knows when I’ll get to wear them because of this COVID-19 pandemic and wanting to speak to people solely based on me being able to boast that I know them. But I noticed at the core of these vast amounts of wasted money, energy, and time that I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. I was buying clothes to meet other people’s impossible standards of who I should be, I was talking to these “unwanted” people that I thought would make me seem important or adequate in life, and in the end, they didn’t. It actually did the exact opposite. It made me realize that I judge myself solely based on my material wealth and others opinions and thoughts of me, and none of my own. It’s a tough and dark thing when you realize how much you care about what others think of you and how far you are willing to go to please someone that wouldn’t even do half of what you do for them. It seemed to be that I lost myself and my core values along this journey we call life. I heeded society and its norms for guidance and acceptance and not my own self and energy. I didn’t love me for me.
But something dawned on me tonight – you have to LOVE YOURZ. What I mean by that is we have to find joy and gratification in the things and people we have in our lives presently. The joy and happiness we seek in those material things and people are actually within ourselves. It is our minds that have tricked us into thinking that what we seek are in those things. J Cole references this Love Yours mantra throughout his song Love Yourz off his album 2014 Forest Hills Drive. He makes it crystal clear that there’s always going to be something else or someone you want even when you have everything you can imagine – it’s the concept of “GREED” that many of us, if not all, have succumbed to. We have to love the stuff we have currently from the beat up old black Air Forces to the cracked iPhone 5 screens…just LOVE YOURZ. We also have to love the ones who have consistently loved us from the jump and through our darkest times, meaning family – moms, dads, siblings, and everyone in-between – LOVE YOURZ.
Most importantly, we have to love ourselves at the end of the day the most, many fall victim to stressing out greatly to buy the best shoes, clothes, and phones to look like the façade of what society dictates is beautiful. Instead of trying to fit into a façade of a societal mold that wasn’t even built to be someone’s reality in the first place, we should try to create our own – one that is catered to us being our authentic and true selves. We should wake up everyday and consciously tell ourselves not to bulge when society asks us to conform to its expectations of beauty. We completely forget beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We shouldn’t dictate our beauty or our value by what we wear and our physical appearances, but by how we treat others and what we feel about ourselves when we lay our heads down at night on our pillows. We have to constantly remind ourselves that each day is a new day, and no one person on this earth can tell us who and what we are because they’re not us, and we’re not them. Be yourself because everybody else is already taken.
