We Are Vessels Of Love - By Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

Written By: Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

Category: Prose

Competition: Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026

Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur graces us with "We Are Vessels Of Love," a profound exploration of love's enigmatic nature. As part of the Creative Writing category, this piece delves into the delicate balance between self-love and the love we extend to others. Presented in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026, Kowlessur's work invites us to question the conventional wisdom surrounding love's prerequisites and its manifestations in our lives.

About the Work

"We Are Vessels Of Love" is a reflective prose that thoughtfully navigates the complexities of love, self-perception, and human connection. Kowlessur's literary style is both introspective and evocative, using vivid imagery to unravel the paradox of giving love without fully embracing it oneself. The piece resonates with a timeless message of compassion, urging readers to embrace their own humanity with the same tenderness offered to others.

We Are Vessels Of Love

Original Submission by Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur

We Are Vessels of Love

There is a sentence I have spent years trying to believe:

“You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.”

People speak it with the quiet certainty of something ancient, something that has never needed to defend itself. It is offered as wisdom, as though love follows an orderly progression: first inward, then outward; first the heart must learn its own name before it can speak another’s.

I have never known what to do with that idea.

Because if it is true, then I have spent much of my life carrying something I was never supposed to possess.

I have given love without knowing how to receive it. I have offered tenderness while believing, somewhere beneath the offering, that I did not belong among those worthy of it. I have held space for other people’s wounds while treating my own as something to conceal.

And yet, I cannot call the love I have given a lie.

That is the contradiction that has followed me for as long as I can remember.

I have never struggled to recognise love when it existed outside of me.

I found it in the quietest places: in the hesitation before someone admits they are not as strong as they pretend to be; in the details people reveal without realising they have entrusted another person with a piece of themselves; in those fragile moments when someone allows the world to glimpse what they have spent so long trying to conceal.

Perhaps that is what has always come most naturally to me: seeing beyond what people try to hide.

I have never been frightened by the parts of others they considered difficult to love. I never mistook a person’s wounds for the entirety of who they were. Their fears were never evidence of weakness, nor were their struggles a measure of their worth.

To me, being human has always meant being unfinished.

People were more than the things they regretted, more than the moments they wished they could rewrite, more than the parts of themselves they had learned to apologise for. I never believed becoming was something a person had to complete before they could be worthy of love.

And yet, when that same gaze turned towards me, it became something I no longer recognised.

I had always believed that understanding was the beginning of kindness. To look closely at something was to know it more intimately; to know it more intimately was to hold it more gently.

Yet when the object of that attention became my own existence, understanding quietly surrendered to judgement.

I became a witness to my own life, but never a compassionate one.

I searched for evidence of what was lacking. I measured what was present against what I believed ought to have been there. Every imperfection seemed to conceal a deeper verdict, as though each insecurity were not simply a part of being human, but proof of everything I feared I was.

How strange it is to become so familiar with your own thoughts that you no longer recognise their cruelty.

I had mistaken harshness for honesty, relentless examination for understanding. I believed that seeing every fault with perfect clarity meant I was seeing myself truthfully, when perhaps I had only learned to look at myself through a lens that made tenderness impossible.

The same wounds I would have met with tenderness in another became, in me, an indictment.

The same humanity I offered so freely to others became the one thing I could never grant myself.

Everyone else was allowed the tenderness of being human; I remained the only person whose humanity I could not fully forgive.

I never stood before another person’s wounds and wondered whether they had suffered beautifully enough to deserve tenderness. I never weighed their imperfections against the kindness they carried. I never asked them to become someone easier to love before allowing myself to care for them.

Yet somewhere along the way, I had written a different set of laws for myself.

I never believed that people had to be perfect before they were allowed to be loved.

I only seemed to believe that perfection was the price of my own belonging.

That is why the sentence unsettled me.

“You have to love yourself before you can love someone else.”

The longer I lived beneath those words, the less they resembled wisdom and the more they resembled a verdict.

If love could emerge only from a heart at peace with itself, then what, exactly, had been living within mine all those years?

Because my own existence has always resisted such neat conclusions.

Long before I learned to recognise tenderness as something that could belong to me, I already knew how to recognise it in another.

I knew the instinct to move gently towards what was fragile. I knew the quiet impulse to protect what was hurting before judgement had the chance to arrive.

I knew how to stay.

Yet whenever that same tenderness found its way back to me, it encountered a door I did not know how to open.

For years, I believed that meant something essential had failed to exist within me.

Now I wonder if it meant something else.

Perhaps my inability to love myself was never evidence of an absence of love.

Perhaps it was simply evidence that I had spent so long giving it away that I had forgotten I was allowed to keep some for myself.

Because I cannot accept that the love I have given was somehow diminished by the love I could not extend to myself.

I cannot believe that every act of kindness was rendered incomplete simply because the person offering it remained unable to receive it.

Love cannot be so fragile.

It cannot disappear simply because the hands that carry it are trembling.

Nor can it become false simply because the heart that bears it has forgotten that it, too, is worthy of tenderness.

Love never announced its arrival.

It did not wait for me to become someone easier to love. It did not demand that I make peace with every part of my existence before allowing itself to take root.

It simply existed.

Quietly shaping the way I reached towards life while I continued searching for proof that something within me was missing.

And perhaps that is what I misunderstood.

I thought love had to begin with recognition—that I had to recognise my own worth before I could claim any right to the love I gave away.

But love has never seemed to follow such orderly rules.

It appeared in the smallest choices, in the instincts I never thought to name, in the gentleness that arrived before judgement had the chance to speak.

It existed in the lives I softened, in the people whose contradictions I made room for, in the simple certainty that another person could be hurting and still be worthy of tenderness.

I spent so much time searching for what was missing that I failed to notice what had remained.

There was always, somewhere beneath the judgments I had placed upon myself, a part of me that still recognised beauty.

A part that still reached for connection.

A part that still believed another person’s existence was reason enough to be cherished.

Maybe that is what it means to be a vessel.

To carry something before we fully understand what it is.

To hold tenderness in hands that do not know how to turn it inward.

To offer warmth while still learning how to stand inside it.

A vessel does not have to understand what it contains for the thing inside it to be real.

Maybe I had spent too long believing that if love could not return to me, then it had never truly been mine.

But perhaps love is not only found in the places where it is received.

Perhaps it is also found in what we carry: in the tenderness we offer, in the lives we soften, in the quiet proof that another person can matter deeply to us even when extending that same grace towards ourselves feels impossible.

I may never fully understand how a heart can hold such compassion for another while remaining so unfamiliar with its own reflection.

How it can recognise the worth of another soul with such certainty, yet falter when that same truth is turned back towards the one carrying it.

But perhaps that is the truth I spent so long trying to deny:

A person can be overflowing with love even while still struggling to let some of it reach the places that have remained untouched by it.

The love carried through a lifetime is not made less real by the moments when it cannot find its way back.

Perhaps we are all, in some way, vessels of love.

We carry things we do not yet know how to give ourselves. We pass tenderness through hands that still tremble. We offer grace to others while slowly learning that we, too, belong beneath its shelter.

Maybe loving yourself was never meant to be the prerequisite for loving another.

Maybe, sometimes, we learn what love is by giving it away.

Maybe we recognise its shape in the lives we soften long before we recognise it in our own.

My inability to see myself clearly never erased the love that existed within me.

It only meant that, for so long, I mistook my inability to recognise something for proof that it was never there.

And perhaps that is what I am finally beginning to understand:

Love does not become less real because the person carrying it has not yet learned how to turn it inward.

It does not demand perfection before it enters.

It does not wait for us to become worthy.

It simply asks to be carried.

Because the heart does not stop carrying what the mind refuses to believe.

About the Competition

The Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 by Hashtag Kalakar is a prestigious platform celebrating diverse voices in literature. It provides writers worldwide an opportunity to share their unique perspectives and creativity. This competition aims to foster a global community of storytellers, showcasing a wide array of themes and styles that reflect the richness of human experience.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Angelina Grace Shekinah Kowlessur for her thought-provoking submission, "We Are Vessels Of Love." Her participation in the Global Poetry and Creative Writing Competition 2026 enriches the literary tapestry woven by voices from around the world. We appreciate her courage in exploring the nuances of love and self-discovery, and we look forward to witnessing her continued journey in creative writing.

About Hashtag Kalakar

Hashtag Kalakar is a creative platform dedicated to providing artists, writers, singers and other creative talents with opportunities to showcase their work and reach wider audiences through competitions, features and creative initiatives.