Unlearning Suffering for Love

Hello froggy friends!!

I used to love suffering. I used to love enduring. I used to love being used for someone else's desires to manifest into reality.

Why? Why would a person love that???

Because I was taught to. I was raised as a woman in the church (although now I identify as a person, and use they/them pronouns), and people who are socialized as women in the christian church are taught to love suffering.

This may not make sense if you hadn't grown up in church, and it may not have ever occurred to you if you did grow up in church.

But, martyrdom and embracing suffering is the call to anyone who is considered feminine. We are supposed to bear the cross of being submissive to a husband, of being the suffering martyr mother of children, of watching the house and the home for the "simple pleasure" of unpaid labor.

That is how I survived, by learning to love that life. I survived my childhood by learning to love a Father God that was genocidal against anyone who made him jealous, and I watched the fathers in my life act the same way. I survived my childhood by learning to love a virgin Mary, who couldn't tell God no, who submitted herself to the Will of a God who would murder entire people groups to make room for "his people". I survived while watching the mothers in my life unable to tell their husbands no, their husbands who became god to them, and would bow to their husbands "holy judgement under god" even when their husbands were disgusting. I survived by learning to be like Jesus, a loving, suffering, martyr. I survived by learning to be like Mary, the holy womb for god to use.

The only acceptable love for me to show others was self sacrificial love. and I survived that.

Now I get to learn how to have new kinds of Love. Queer love, the kind that looks different and acts different than the "average". Disabled love, the kind that fights hierarchy of worth and convinces the world that all are deserving of love. Platonic love, the kind that doesn't need any romantic or sexual handouts to deserve a fully whole and complete Love.

I am so grateful that I got to learn that there is more to life than suffering and enduring in the name of a love that would never see me. I am so grateful I get to be seen by Love in ways I never have dreamed possible.

I do not love suffering anymore, mine or anybody else's. I do not love enduring abuse for the sake of enduring all. I do not endure abuse, I call out abuse.

I release the idea that enduring and suffering are the keys to unconditional love. That was the old way.

My new way of unconditional Love is this: I love me for who I am exactly as I am, and I am willing to make mistakes to learn how to Love. I love humans for exactly who they are, and I am willing to let other humans make mistakes to learn how to Love.

I am excited to enjoy Love, instead of merely endure for it.

Thank you for reading, I love you froggies, Sunflower