Theodore – Toronto / NYC
“That the greatest thing that you’ll ever learn is to love and be loved and the hardest part of that along the way is learning to love yourself, but once you learn how to do that your ability to give back to everyone and have an impact on the world will be bigger than you could ever imagine.
I was actually born in New York and I lived the vast majority of my life going back and forth between Toronto and New York. I moved to New Zealand 6 years ago. I moved to Wellie and now I live in Auckland and I am actually an author and a podcaster and I’ve been travelling the world trying to change it, trying to have an impact, and when I found New Zealand I knew I was home and I stayed.
Honestly, Wellington is much more home for me and the reason is because it’s much closer, smaller – everything is easier to get to and the challenge that I had with Auckland my first time and actually when I came back is that it was very hard to meet people and get to know people because everyone really keeps to themselves a lot and unless you know someone it’s very hard to meet new people especially if you don’t know anything, or you’ve never been here before. So now that I’ve been here long enough to have friends and people that I care about it’s grown on me a little bit more. But sometimes I still feel very disconnected here in Auckland.
So part of the reason why I started doing what I do just in terms of writing and podcasting is because I think the biggest challenge that I face as an adult was all the things that people didn’t teach me as a child and not because they didn’t want to but maybe because they didn’t understand themselves, and really self-love was really a part of that. We get taught that we have to go to school and get a job and we don’t always get taught the reasons why but the most important part of that, even telling someone to be happy, is teaching them to love themselves, and so now that I have learnt that I try and give it back and part of giving it back is helping people understand how to love themselves.
If you don’t love yourself, no matter how much someone else gives to you or pours into you it’s never really enough.
The simplest way I can describe it, is a sense of fullness and the reason that’s so important is because all of that time before the fullness was a tremendous emptiness, and all of the years that I spent in between those two places was trying to learn to understand how to fill the emptiness, why I felt it, and what was missing, and being complete is a feeling that I can never replace.”
