For wheat is wheat

“If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

1) What is this feeling like tears in my chest, clogged and grief-filled and heartsick?

2) Why do I think I am worth nothing, who’s impossible and sky-high standards am I contorting and stretching myself, as if on a torture rack, to try to even touch?

3) Is this why Oikawa Tooru means so much to me, he with the deeply internalized inferiority complex, he who tries so hard to touch Ushijima’s unturned back, he who keeps trying to be enough until enough has lost its shape and meaning entirely?

4) Let me ask myself this: am I really worth nothing to myself? What will it take before I am worth something, to me? Every other person is beautiful and has a million-dollar price tag attached. But not me. Why does every other person deserves more than me?

5) I murmur to myself, with some truth: “I matter, I like myself, I am not unskilled.” But in all truth, these are like three mere grains of rice placed against a ten tonne “I am not enough” weight. The scales barely shiver. I am not enough. It is a special kind of heartbreak to know, sure as bones, that you are not worth much to yourself.

5) Maybe the only thing I can do is to keep choosing myself, like an infidel lover proving herself again. Maybe the only thing I can do is to extend compassion and companionship and presence to myself, time and again, like a mother to her child. Maybe I have to prove to myself that I am here, and only then will I be enough.

6) I do not want to do it. I am not a Hercules beetle, able to lift up a load a hundred times its weight. I cannot lift up my heart. I do not want to.

7) But Oikawa Tooru, who is heart-sick the way I am, did so. He lifted his thousand-pound heart because he chose what he could not live without. He chose how he wanted to live. I, too, want to stop feeling this grief. I, too, want to be capable of amazing feats of strength. I, too, want to choose how I live.

8) Oh, when will I matter? Gentle, gentle now, like a salve, like a lullaby, like a promise: I am good. I am worthy. I am enough.