Accept and Love Your Friends and Family

Accept and Love Your Friends and Family
by
Robin Hall


Many of us have IT; and here that means any illness, mine is the entire depression syndrome and alcoholism. Yours could be ___.

Many of us have other things going on or are different from society's average, norm.

We might be addicted to ??? alcohol, various drugs, various...

Maybe we are creative and this gets in the way of acceptance. We are different, we are the same people even so.

Maybe we are gay or lesbian. Hardly personal preferences, just us as we really are. We are the same person BEFORE you knew and we are the same AFTER you found out. We are different and who gets to pick who they love? We are the same.

Maybe we are tall.

Maybe we are short, really short, a little person. Different, but the same. Do we not think as others, behave, love?

A muslim? A christian? A jew?

Shakespeare was telling us about acceptance when he wrote, in The Merchant of Venice, "I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?"

Just put your family member's or friend's OTHERNESS in place of jew. ARE we that different? Doesn't acceptance and love of our favorite people begin the way we define OUR core self?

If you accept and love us us do you not gain? If you do not accept and love your own family, your own friends for some "reason," who is to blame but YOU?

Seek within. Look in the mirror of life that you know this is about and judge yourself. Then realize we ARE you and if that mirror cracks, its not US that cracked it.