Respect? Do I?

All relationships emanate from the first feel of appreciation and through the corridors of mutual respect towards understanding and acceptance and love leading to happiness and all its synonymic feelings. The pertinent question hanging on me for quite some time is whether in normal parlance we do unto ourselves what we do unto others when in love. Do we really appreciate ourselves (without being complacent); do we respect ourselves as much as we expect from others; do we understand and love ourselves (without being vain and egoist)?

Honestly, I have struggled in answering these questions positively.

Have for long been unforgiving and un-oblivious of rejections (according to me) that have hurt me over the passage of time, complaining quite unreasonably and what-they-say-quite-often ‘indulged’ myself in luxury of brooding and self-pity quite unwittingly though. The other day, a friendly plain speaking: ‘The day you accept yourself, with all your frailties, generously and lovingly, sixty percent of these complaints will vanish’ hit me hard like a thud and I stumbled and fumbled with words but beat a retreat accepting in totality that true, I have not accepted myself as respectfully as I deserve.

No gainsaying the fact that the citadel of a relationship stands on load bearing columns and beams of respect and appreciation, love and understanding-all these have the portent potential of questionability, questionable stability and minus any of these columns, the fate of the structure of relationship quite imaginably is shaky, uncertain, collapsible anytime.

But that’s in relation to ‘the other’ factor. What about our own selves respecting our own privacy, judgment, freedom, choice and right to be, speak, live? When vociferous and confident counterparts demand explanations then the meek, super-hyper-sensitive inside us finds easy escape route in self-condemnation, rejection and sometimes even total denial. As we sow so do we reap: when we choose to show dis-respect to ourselves why we should expect to be respected and accepted? Unable to appreciate our own idiosyncrasies, we really cannot command respect from others-there being such a thin thread between command and a demand.

If only we could learn to sing to ourselves what we love others to hear-be it ‘Chiquitita’, ‘We shall overcome’, ‘Arziyan’ or ‘Chal mere saath hi chal, ay meri jaan e ghazal’.