To the Single Ladies: Return to Self, You Are Love.
{Photo credit: Jen Young}
Most women would prefer death by an atomic bomb to being single. It seems that we always need people to make us happy, to complete us.
I know you have heard people say, “I will never feel complete until I find my soul mate.” So we spend our lives waiting and searching for he whom they call The One. The One is always every woman’s messiah, every woman’s salvation. So we envy women who have found their The One, and hate ourselves for failing to find our happily-ever-after man.
Any lady who has not found the one is seen as a lefetwa (a left-behind woman) and one who is definitely dying alone and bitter with 30 cats. We are so certain of this fact you would think The One
was some kind of insurance against life and all its unfortunate happenings.
Our culture hates being single so much that the self-help Find-your-forever-man-book-and-glossy-magazine business is a multi-billion-dollar industry. Then a woman like me will come along and say, “Look closely, aren’t you the messiah you are looking for? Because in all honesty, you deserve your love first before any other business.”
There’s this instruction to Seek ye first His kingdom, and all the other things will be added unto you. The distorted view of love has made women feel inadequate and afraid to be alone, so they sacrifice themselves for relationships. As women, we neglect ourselves and our own evolution, and we focus all our attention and energies on that unicorn called The One.
Then out of desperation and fear, we give ourselves to compromising — and sometimes abusive — relationships in the process of finding love. Because the woman has sacrificed herself for a relationship, she finds that she has no hobbies, no interests, no passions apart from loving and obsessing over The One confusing him for love while he in fact is just a bad habit and an obsession.
The woman who lacks a sense of self very soon exhausts her lover and herself. Her heart weighs the man down as it becomes a really heavy heart to carry, the man falls because he cannot stand holding both his heart and hers.
No man can handle the burden of being God. Yet we pray to men, and we want them to provide us with happiness, belongingness, security, salvation, etc. — things that a man of flesh cannot possibly provide. As long as the woman remains this limited person, she is vulnerable, she is a victim of love and of relationships, she blames everyone but herself for her life and her relationships, she does not own herself.
Being single is a gift. Single women are invited by life to use this time for their pilgrimage, for self-reflection. To embrace the empty spaces, the solitude and the silence. Single women are called to come back to their house made of skin and flesh. The silence says to them, “Houses that are made on the skins of other people have a terrible desire to be lost.”
Women are called to come back to the burning houses, to the dust and the debris that is their forgotten selves, and to willingly burn in the solitude and the silence so that they can be reborn as warriors and conjurers of magic.
The silence keeps whispering to the single woman, “When you are out in the wilderness, lost and searching for what you call love, know that what you are looking for is a return to home, you are looking for a healer, a physician, but it is okay because you are the love you seek, you are the physician here.”
That is why I love being single, because I love the woman that I am becoming when I am with Me. I take time out to invest in Me, to find out what moves Me, what my passions are, and to chase my intuition and my bliss. Each day I take time out to gently hold my inner child in my arms and nourish her. I read to her, I play with her, I have long conversations about stuff with her.
Every time I give Me time, I become whole, I become a complete person who does not need a rescuer. I become aware of the fact that I deserve life and love and all the good things that life brings to me. I am love, I am the wave and God is the ocean. Because I am love, I can only attract love, and because I am love, I can never exist outside of love, I can never be lonely because loneliness is the absence of love.
I love relationships, but I also view being alone as a gift, and all life’s gifts are beautiful to me, gifted to be enjoyed. I will not squander the gift of being alone by standing on the sidelines and watching life disappear as I wait for the fairy tale prince who, according to modern-day superstition, is supposed to give me happiness and make me whole.
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Khutsafalo Kasale is a service yogini, a writer, an activist, an African patriot from Botswana, and a lover of all things Art and Culture. As a service yogini, she dedicates her time teaching Yoga to those who desperately need it but cannot afford it, at orphanages, psychiatric hospitals and community centers. She dreams of writing a manual for the dead some day. You can connect with Khutsafalo via her website or Twitter.
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