Love after Love - Derek Walcott

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.

I have loved this poem since I was 14. My English teacher gave us the task of finding a poem online and me and my friend Alice were stuck. She showed us this poem and explained that she was going through a break up with her boyfriend and this poem was helping her through it. Fast forward eight years and with every poignant moment in my life, I have always found comfort in this poem. Heartbreak, grief, depression. The meaning that I have taken from it has changed slightly over time, but it still remains to be a poem that means so much to me.

The importance of loving yourself can never be overlooked. It is what we should be teaching our children from the earliest age. It is so easy to let life take over and to forget yourself and I think many of us do it.

The most obvious time it happens is falling in love for the first time – suddenly your worlds spins because of one single person and everything can come crashing down when that person doesn’t turn out quite how you imagined. Let’s be honest – it happens to nearly all of us. This is the hardest time to realise your worth, personally being a 17 year old girl having been heartbroken by my first love, I thought my life was over and I’d never feel anything again.

Of course it was not. I soon picked up the pieces, this poem taught me to “take down the photographs…the desperate notes” and that is what I did. I soon found love again, but unfortunately it wasn’t love for myself. I fell in love quickly, passionately and after six months that person passed away  tragically and my life fell apart. I soon realised that I didn’t know who I was, I had always relied on other people to keep me upright and suddenly I felt completely out of my depth. Of course, I flew away, went to uni, and it was here that Love after Love became a daily read for me.

Being away from home, dealing with grief, trying to figure out who I was myself as my own person was a challenge. At times I didn’t think I could do it, I wanted to give up and lie in bed all day. Give up and spend my days building a time machine. Give up and do anything but live. It is during these dark times that your inner strength comes to light, and your mind and body have a way of switching on, working together and pushing you on. I started reading again, I lived alone and worked out who Amy Louise McInerney at 18 wanted to be.

In the 18 months after that I came to realise that before I could do anything, before I could move on with my life I had to fall in love with myself. If you can’t love yourself how can you expect anyone to love you? At 20 I knew who I was, what I wanted and I was happy. I met Chris, fell in love and I felt safe. Safe knowing that he fills up a pretty massive space in my life, but he doesn’t quite complete me. I didn’t need to find him to find myself. I already knew who I was. At least I thought I did. 

When I left uni, I entered a state of depression - suddenly I didn't quite have a purpose anymore. I had been surrounded by negativity for a lot of the time but hadn't noticed it until I took a step away from it all. 

I still had Chris, but we had just moved in together, I didn't have a stable job and I had begun to fall out with my group of friends. I knew that I had changed and being away from home for the three years I spent studying had made me grow into a different person but I didn't know how to be that person living back in Milton Keynes. Things between me and Chris weren't great and I felt myself fall into a bit of a black hole.

However - I then got a job at the school that I now work at. I threw myself in and began to love every second of my working day again. I had a purpose. Students were starting to relate to me and I felt like I was doing a good job. Working with students is such an intense job, you need to feel 100% in yourself to be able to give the students the best of yourself. So I did. I worked on myself. I began to love myself again, and gave myself back some time. I started journalling, reading more, getting a structure back in my life - waking up at the same time each day, spending time with close friends regularly, eating fruit and vegetables...generally just sorting my life out!

Ultimately Love after Love is about appreciating life, yourself and being able to find yourself after hardship. No matter what happens in my life, I always resort back to this poem. Life goes past too quickly, we don’t notice the small things. We all need to sit, and feast on the beauty life brings more often.