I remember Sam Rongh, who was a great gay guy I had the fortune to meet and interact with when he was working at our high school.
I have always been astonished by wondering how they felt within, and why it is so important, so urging for them to live as who they are, regardless all the hardship, all the discrimination they had to face from the society at large. I myself could hardly put myself in his shoes, but I can’t avoid admiring his courage for being the best version of himself.
Many lived a life being unloved, just because they were different. They don’t love the same people whom some thought they were supposed to. They don’t love the same people who some told them to be with.
Now thinking back, I was struggling with keeping myself positive. Me and few other peeps were miserable with the school life, and regardless how well-aware we were with our anxiety, we were not great at dealing with it. But people like Sam Rongh gave me a good reason for taking this in a different way. You gotta love yourself first.
To be emotionally healthy, a person needs to:
- Feel safe and secure; feel they have safe territory.
- Regularly give and receive quality attention.
- Feel a sense of influence and control over their life.
- Feel part of a wider community.
- Enjoy friendship, fun, love, and intimacy with significant people.
- Feel a sense of status; basically, feel they have a recognizable role in life. This also connects to a sense of competence and achievement.
- Feel stretched but not stressed to avoid stagnation, boredom, and to enhance self-esteem and a sense of status in life.
One of the most essential needs of a human being is love – lack of words to describe it here, but it’s the needs to be taken care of, to be supported and to be understood. The idealistic community only exists when its inhabitants felt being loved by everyone. At that time, individual security is enhanced, everybody would feel comfortable staying because they feel safe expressing themselves. But this is not always the case, and the opposite sometimes is closer to the truth. Since we come from different places and don’t live long enough, we could be disintegrated with our home country and disintegrated with our current community. The ideology of belonging is desirable yet could be impossible to achieve. In the case where the community has failed to provide a sense of belonging to a person, ways that person could fulfill his need is to provide love himself, live independently from the surrounding or make the effort to put himself in a different setting where he could meet the need.
After all loving oneself is an essential thing even though we might live in a collective community where support is vastly provided. When others fail to give in that support, at least we have ourselves to count onto.
Qbooz 