There is a silence in the morning, before the first notifications arrive, before the mirror reminds us of the day’s expectations. In that silence, there might be a whisper—something small, something nearly drowned out by the machinery of routine. It is the voice of the self, asking, however hesitantly, for love.
Frida Kahlo knew, more than most, the struggles of life. She also knew a thing or two about love, and how, without the second, the first has no weight. “Fall in love with yourself, with life, and then with whomever you like” she said. A simple sequence, yet how many of us have started at the end? We chase love as if it were an answer to a question we have not yet dared to ask. We look for devotion, for recognition, for the warmth of another’s presence, all without first facing the stranger in the mirror.
We have been taught, perhaps, that loving oneself is indulgence. That it is selfish, even vain. The world demands our productivity, our performance, our compliance. It does not ask whether we have made peace with our own existence. And so, we move through the days half-empty, waiting for someone else to complete a puzzle we have never learned to solve on our own.
To love oneself is not to admire, nor to excuse, nor to construct a mask pleasing enough to be mistaken for truth. It is to sit, sometimes uncomfortably, with the full weight of one’s own being. To acknowledge, without embellishment, the cracks and inconsistencies, the disappointments, the embarrassments, the persistent, unshakeable fact of imperfection. And to say, despite it all: yes. Yes, this is who I am.
Without that yes, what is love but a hollow echo? We hand others a version of ourselves we do not even believe in, hoping they will fill the gaps with something we cannot name. But love, the real kind, does not survive on wishful thinking. It asks for presence, for commitment—not to an ideal, but to what is. And what is begins with the self.
If we are to love life, we must first make peace with being alive. If we are to love another, we must first make peace with ourselves. Otherwise, love is only a borrowed thing, something we use for warmth but never truly own. And there is nothing more lonely than a love that does not belong to us.
So perhaps the task is not to search, nor to wait, nor to demand. Perhaps it is simply to listen—to that small voice in the morning, before the day begins, before the noise takes over. To hear it, to answer it, and in time, to believe it.
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