Becoming the Strong Independent Woman

Another, longer, ramble. All these ideas (I think) will make more sense when I put them into the context of my own life at the end of this mini-series thing. Again, please share your thoughts at the end!

 

Oh my.

Need.

We are always told that we as women feel the desire to be wanted, needed and loved. From my experience this is true, but it is not as strong or as negative as the world makes it seem. We are also told that in order to give love and receive love, we must love ourselves “truly.” This is also true and not as difficult as how the world makes it seem. We are told that in order to overcome these desires we must become a “strong independent woman who don’t need no man,” seemingly ignoring these desires or selfishly getting them fulfilled in the here and now with whomever tickles our fancy.

 

There is a great DIY, self-help culture lately, especially with YouTube vlogs, which makes it seem as though there is a great journey to reach the point of self-acceptance and where your desires are met. I think the testimony culture within churches escalates this as well, we believe that if we do not have an instantaneous revelation or turnaround that we are on the road of a long journey to freedom. Is there no middle ground? Is it possible to reach this point without the 5 key steps, long wrestling match with doubt and constant stumbling?

I was watching a spoken word piece yesterday that spoke of the guilt of enjoying the physical interactions that we know do not fit in with how we wanted our life’s story to pan out. The lady in the video said rightly, this guilt should not be felt. We were designed to enjoy physical touch so we should not feel guilty about enjoying it or craving more of it, but we should recognise the right time and place for it. Just like within a relationship there are wrong times for PDA and right times and places to enjoy intimacy, in life there are right and wrong times to be enjoying physical touch.

How would love work without vulnerability? If we didn’t have that desire to be needed and wanted would we even go looking for love? We are told that as women we use sex, romance, dates, physical touch and all those things to gain love and that this is a bad thing. Now I’m not advocating going and using all these things to fill the void that can only be filled with love but I am going to say that I think that we, especially us Christian girls, view this desire as a negative thing where it is a natural, beautiful thing that if channelled correctly can enhance love.

As with anyone else, I have made my fair share of mistakes and continue to, so this is written as much to encourage myself as it is to do so for you. It is really hard writing this without including my story as that’s how I processes best, so I will include my journey in the next post. I need to exclude myself though so that I have a set of raw truths to come back to myself.

It all comes back to what I said in my last post, love is a choice that we make, and a choice that must be carefully timed. We must be content without love before we are ready to receive love, otherwise it will become like a drug and we would not be able to function without it. If we approach love as a whole, full person then we will have love to give and not have to rely on another person to fill our empty void.

Okay, so we have the need to be needed and a void that cannot be only filled with love but these must be met and fulfilled before we are ready to receive or give love. How does that even work!? The need we have to feel as though someone needs us and to feel completely, unconditionally loved. No mention of romance there. You can be needed by many people or groups in your life, whether it’s as simple as your dog really needing you to survive, your little sister needing you to hold her while she cries, your gym buddy needing you to keep them motivated to get up at 6am for a run, or your clients at work really needing you, your need to be needed can be met in another capacity if we focus away from finding a significant other.

Non-romantic love can fill that void in the same capacity. The most fulfilling way to satisfy the need for love is learn to love yourself. It is a great cliché, but it is so true! Loving yourself is being content with where you are, accepting where you have been and being determined to make yourself and your future great.

Connecting this back to my original question that started this blog – is this either a journey that lasts a long time or an instantaneous revelation or is there a middle ground? I believe that there is no need for it taking a long time to figure out, however long it takes you to believe that you are loved, needed and desirable and adjust your outlook and behaviour to that is all it takes. There will be no definite finish line as self-worth is something we have to decide daily, but I do not feel as though the journey is quite as long as we sometimes make it out to be.

These needs are only human, but believing that they control us and determine our sense of self-worth is perfectly Freudian. You are needed, loved and wanted in many capacities. Recognising this, deciding this and walking it out on a daily basis is the way that I am finding works to change our mindset to become that “strong independent woman that don’t need no man.” Waking up each morning and realising that you are wanted, needed and loved, complete without a man by your side yet completely and utterly desirable will set you free from being controlled by the world telling you that you need to have your desired fulfilled by a man in order to be happy.

These desires were not built into us to control us, as this normally brings heartbreak and a lost sense of identity. Instead, we were meant to control them in order to and depth and intimacy to our relationships in a safe and healthy way. Without proper control and understanding of these desires we end up in a string of moments to try and quench the here and now. Having a good grip on them will deepen and make a true love more beautiful. Not true love in the Disney sense, but a true love in the sense that your connection with this person is multi-faceted and that it is based on mutual respect, trust and a desire to benefit, grow and bless the other while protecting your heart. A love that you will remain thankful for every day, even if it were to end.

To love is a choice we make

Okay, so there will be a theme for the next few posts (shock horror, I am actually structuring my blog!) around love simply because I think about it a lot in many different ways and it has been on my mind a lot lately. So here is post number one, it is a ramble of musings that I scribbled down tonight.

If we align ourselves with God and pursue an intimate relationship with Him, He will bless what we do because we will align our actions to His will out of a desire to want to be with and like Him. When we understand who we are and whose we are, everything we do will be to strengthen that and to empower the person it is that we believe we are. If we understand that we are great and destined for greatness, we will align ourselves with people that reflect the same.

The whole thing of "it takes one to know one," works in a positive way too - we recognise what we are, in others - it is the principle that discipleship and replication in leadership is based on. This is why we take the love that we think we deserve, because what we want to grow or shield within ourselves is what we look for in people that we believe have potential to grow with us and extend us, people that will both take from us and give to us.

That balance must be maintained in our relationships so that we do not start viewing the other person as a projection or turn them in to our parent or source of fulfilment. It is like stretching dough, as you pull one side you must pull the other so that you do not end up with a lump of dough ripped off from a flattened piece that takes work to kneed back together, but rather a whole piece that is perfectly flat. In the same way that you are stretched you must stretch the other person and vice versa. It is a balance that must be consciously maintained.

So we choose who to love and how to love them. Our culture tries to tell us that there is a formula to finding someone and a way to love them - that we have a certain "type" and while it is true that there are certain personalities, characters and habits that we will be good, better and best with whilst other pairings will be toxic, I truly believe that we could make most of our failed attempted relationships work.

A little more tolerance, a little more patience and a little less eagerness and rush and I believe that we would save a lot of heartache. If we were more deliberate in our choices of who we loves and how we loved on a daily basis we would have many more beautiful stories to tell with more happy tears and blocks of chocolate and tubs of ice cream shared.

Hope that made some sense! Please someone drop me a comment and let me know if it did and what your thoughts are! xx

Made to Bloom

If you can, listen to this while reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPeudF7tcD8

I am supposed to be studying for finals in my first semester at university. I am supposed to be memorising the rules and equations of STAT110, but it is really killing my brain and I realised on Sunday that I have not written in ages. So here I am, on a study break from doing what I detest, doing what I do best instead. Or at least, what I think I do well. I will keep it very short though as I really do need to study.

At the beginning of the year I attended a student camp at my new church. I was going through a period of immense struggle after moving away from home and university life being rather lonely if you’re underage and not into clubbing as well as working through great personal issues. God used this camp to extend a metaphor that I had received late last year when preparing to graduate high school, an acorn.

My mum bought me Max Lucado’s “The Oak Inside the Acorn” and an acorn necklace for graduation and I loved the metaphor of the story. In a nutshell, the story is about a little acorn whose oak tree mother always said to it that “Inside you is a great oak” and the acorn’s journey of falling from the tree, being planted and never understanding its potential because it kept comparing itself with the other plants in the garden. Eventually the acorn found its purpose.

In the period of life that I am currently in I am constantly having to fight to find my purpose, my dream and my goals in life. God is revealing to me slowly that the expected nature of having a five year plan on what to study, when you are going to get married and settled down, where you are going to live and what job you are going to do is not how my life is panning out. It is more like a series of steps and discoveries. At the moment, I have just been planted. My dad said to me when I left home, “The work has been done, the soil has been prepared and the seed has been planted. It is now time to grow.” What I did not realise it what it requires of a seed to grow.

I may not be 100% scientifically correct, but the metaphor works for me, so here goes. When seeds are planted their only environment is the soil immediately around them, there is nothing but darkness and dirt. They rely on a farmer or water source to water them and on the soil to provide them with nutrients. Without the right environment their life will not begin. Even in the right environment though seeds need to break before they can grow (here is where my biology is a bit fuzzy). An acorn is encased in a hard shell and in order for it to be able to sprout roots and grow it has to break open this shell and then the cells of the seed must divide like crazy to develop – right? Well, that is how I see it anyway. From what I can imagine this period of breaking and dividing in order to grow would be rather painful if I were a seed and that is what I felt was going on in my life at the time.

This picture taught me to put my pain into perspective; all the pain and breaking off of dead cells was to lead me to be able to grow better and stronger. It also taught me that I need to rely on other sources to carry me in times of pain – in my case God was my gardener, and life was my soil providing me nutrients through His word and my family and loved ones. I had to learn to rely on them if I wanted to be able to grow to see the garden that I was planted in in order to understand my purpose.

I am not saying that I have it all sorted or that since discovering this metaphor that life has become easier, I still stumble and heaven only knows that I really fail at life some days. The important thing is that when I take a step back to breathe that I can put it all in perspective and accept it for what it is.

I cannot wait to break through the soil and bloom!