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"Love hasn’t always found me gently. Learning to love and accept myself fully is often uncomfortable and messy but I’m trying to find strength to be forgiving in this rawness.
I am a complex chaos, a healing wound, wildly emotional and inherently expressive. Feeling misunderstood and too much comes easily to me when I sit alone with my heart that is pretending-to-be-a-planet big. I am choosing to believe that I am not defined by the times I’ve felt difficult to understand. I am not a reflection of anything but my own authentic and vulnerable self.
Within learning to be my own greatest love, I am returning to myself like uncovering big feelings for a forgotten friend. I am holding my own hand. I am accepting that I am worthy of all the love and tenderness I can fit in my body.
I have not always been so hard on myself, on my body. It’s a hardness I’ve been taught but in its place I am consciously trying to teach myself softness so that I can peel back all the layers of society’s expectations (synonymous with undressing as I run to meet the sea with my nakedness) until all that remains is gentle tender love.
I want to love myself in such a way that I remind myself that it’s the strongest force I know. That it has flooded my chest many times. A force that has shaped, folded and bruised me. Wrapped in my patience, I am healing these bruises.
I find comfort in knowing that the feeling I get when I am painfully aware of how many rolls my tummy makes when I sit will one day be a fossil. I’m still learning but I’m getting braver and better at believing I’m a good thing all on my own.
Being intimate with myself is becoming easier to do. I am writing myself little love letters in the way I dance alone clumsily and take up space and feel everything with such intensity but most importantly in the way that I am not feeling apologetic for these things anymore. I am proud of my heart and of my body that, regardless of its size, is full of kindness.
My hope for myself is to feed my childlike curiosity in new and challenging ways, to find strength and sexiness in my body by consciously embracing my divine feminine energy and most importantly to recognise kindness and softness in every aspect of my being.
You can break your own heart and compare and criticize and over analyze everything that you do or you can let yourself be an imperfect, constantly evolving mess and love yourself outrageously and with intent."
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Meeting Pippa,
When asked who I am, I find the best description is soft sunset pink in the shape of a marshmallow, soft and wild. I’d like to say that I’m a writer or a poet but mostly I write for myself or because I just can’t keep the words in or sometimes I’m lucky enough to write on a platform such as this one. That brings me to this piece I’ve written. This piece is like a love letter to myself and to all of you that finds something familiar or comforting or maybe even challenging therein. I hope you’ll take it as a prompt to be more gentle and vulnerable with yourself and acknowledge that is scary but also very necessary. Spread love, let it fill your body from your bone marrow to your fingertips and then let it spill over and embrace every aspect of your life. Say ‘I love you’ to your friends and family and most importantly, to yourself (and mean it)!
Thank you for being soft with me because sharing such an intimate writing piece is a bit scary.
Beautiful Pip captured on film by
Nina, wearing her Sheri set
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