By: Gabrielle Janovsky
Sometimes, you need to learn to love yourself entirely before you can ever share your love with someone else. Gabrielle Ledesma, a makeup artist for ALT magazine, spent isolation with her partner. During a pandemic, intimacy becomes entirely redefined when stuck in a room with your partner, the days passing, experiencing monotony. Your space is no longer just yours. We are required to become conscious about the company we keep. Being so close and proximate to her partner, Gabrielle realized that she needed her own space to grow; otherwise, she would end up “meshing” into her partner.
To save herself, Gabrielle had to love herself enough to advocate for her dreams, taking up the physical space and time needed to pursue them. In a society as cruel as ours, you are your advocate. Unfortunately, even those closest to us will not always provide us with the pushes we need to self-actualize our dreams. You have to love yourself enough to push. Self-love becomes the root of every healthy relationship, with friends, partners, yourself & even your goals. Loving yourself means taking care of your own needs, recognizing that your needs are specific to you, and only you can fulfill them. Self-love is keeping around the people who understand that and push you towards your most whole self and telling those who love you how to best support you in your journeys.
At the beginning of a pandemic, it is easy to become dejected and forget about the things you have always wanted to try and do if you only had more time. Being creative seems less enticing when you are surviving a pandemic when the entire world stops. Gabrielle’s world stopped amidst an intimate relationship, her time escaping just as pre-covid times do.
Gabrielle is a passionate sewer and would often leave her belongings at her home while visiting her partner at his place. Gabrielle found herself “spending so much time with [my partner] I didn’t have time to spend by myself… losing my passions.” In the past, sexual intimacy brought her lots of healing. For Gabrielle, sex “reinforces that I am actually loved, but I do not think that is necessarily healthy.” When you share a space with your partner, physical intimacy cannot heal the way it does heal when you have physical space. Intimacy is not in short. While in isolation, intimacy with oneself can be nearly impossible to find, and for many, self-love can only happen while alone. Gabrielle needed to make changes to regain her sense of self. Gabrielle chose to pursue creative endeavors.
What brought Gabrielle a sense of self-love and intimacy with herself, “discovering new ways to be creative” and spending more time enjoying the “small” things. Gabrielle found self-love through creating with her sewing machine, spending time with her roommates & continuing to explore things to do on her own. Gabrielle built herself self-care rituals through movement therapy. Dancing and letting her mind be free and evaluating brought Gabrielle to falling in love with herself. Journaling became part of critical self-reflection, a type of self-reflection that every human being needs. Especially when it is so painful to sit and be honest with your feelings, only through these intimate moments alone can we begin to fall in love with ourselves. When you are alone dancing in your room or with your sewing machine, it is just you and your art. You get to build a relationship with the things that your hand and brain create. You begin to fall in love with yourself.
After speaking to Gabrielle about her relationship, I realized that the only healing could occur between two whole partners. To be an entire partner, you have to be in love with yourself. A person cannot share the love if they have none to give, and loving yourself can exist as a reminder that you are worthy of being loved. Loving yourself without apologies permits others to love you in that way, too. When you begin to love yourself enough to advocate for the things you know that are right for you, you can be surprised at all the beautiful things your hands and mind can create. When you begin to live for yourself entirely, it is also amazing to see who shows up to see you shine. After interviewing Gabrielle, I am confident that she will continue to shine, too.