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How to be gentle with yourself.

Rachel Clifton
3 min readMay 20, 2020

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This is an opening. An invitation. An awakening.

A reminder that the difference between past and future is but a mere tilt of the head, and that both are fantasies, of a kind — nothing more than constructions and reconstructions and dreams.

We reject the idea of make-believe because it seems indistinct, because we want to believe that the known is more than just a reckoning, because the idea of all that we hold dear dissolving is too much for us to bear.

And yet —hold yourself, dear one.

We are but mirrors.

Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash

What I see in you is all that I can and will be, emanating. It is in Otherness, paradoxically, that we find connection; the joy of recognition chest-to-chest with the door slam of rejection. What both say is that I see you, deeply and unflinchingly; that apathy and indifference are not enough for us — not an option, even.

I can’t explain how I feel when I write; how I can be sitting on the sofa or walking along, just going about my day, and believe with every fibre of my being that I have never felt so alive.

What it gives me. What it kindles in me. The love in my heart that I feel as I think of you and I think of me and we inexplicably, inextricably intermingle.

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Rachel Clifton
Rachel Clifton

Written by Rachel Clifton

Perennially irreverent. Gently fierce. Fiercely loving. A thing of beauty, work of art & human being, just like you. https://bio.site/rachelclif.

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