I love you

I started writing this post lying in bed yesterday afternoon and it was really good. Unfortunately there is no wire direct from my brain to my blog, and I was too tired to get up and type it there and then. Given that I'm still feeling pretty icky, I'm not sure how much sense this will make, but I'll try my best. I'm sorry if it just turns out to be sentimental mush. I blame the fact that I'm tired and ill!

Three of my favourite words at the moment are "I love you". They're wonderful to say, and they're wonderful to hear. Before you all start saying, "hey, stop, wait a minute, are we missing something?" let me explain.

One of the things I've been learning this year is to love myself. And I really think that I'm actually beginning to get there. I don't look in the mirror and think I'm ugly, rather I look in the mirror and think "who on earth is that?", but that's another story! I'm more confident about myself and my thoughts and feelings. I'm beginning to find my voice.

Dealing with depression and illness has definitely showed me that there are a lot of people in this world who care about me. People who will go out of their way to tell me and show me that they love me. Having in the past always been better at caring for others than receiving, I've been in the situation that I couldn't do it for myself, I needed to rely for a bit on the support of other people, and I'm so glad that I did. It's shown me again how important friends are and how much I love mine.

So here we come to it, the reason I love to "I love you". I want to tell my friends and family how much I appreciate them. For example, when Little One (the 3 year old I child-mind) tells me that he loves me, I reply "I love you too, Sweetheart", I want him to know that he's important to me, that I valued him, that I like spending time with him. The same goes for my friends and my family, I want them to know for sure that I love them, I don't want them to wonder what I think about them.

I don't know if that makes any sense at all, but that's why I say "I love you". I'm saying it because I value you, you're important to me, I want you to know that I care.