'How is it you can all talk so nicely?’ Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. `I’ve been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.’

'Put your hand down, and feel the ground’, said the Tiger-lily.

'Then you’ll know why’.

Alice did so.'It’s very hard’, she said, 'but I don’t see what that has to do with it.’

'In most gardens’, the Tiger-lily said, 'they make the beds too soft — so that the flowers are always asleep’.

– Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland 

if self-love is supposed to feel good
why do i feel so numb then?
how do i shake this nothingness from inside off

how do i overcome this shaking and shrinking pain that has taken me down on my knees

it embarrasses me from saying it out loud. it embarrasses me from not being able to express it in my mother tongue. because it would mean admitting the shame that this self thought love i have been trying to learn is nothing but my own pity

ask the devil in the mirror for mercy.