From Love Lost To Love Found
Put yourself first — it matters
At one point or another, most of us have probably said (or had somebody tell us) something along the lines of “You have to love yourself before you can love somebody else.”
I must say I disagree with the notion.
If we were to wait until everything was perfect within ourselves, we would be perpetually alone. However, it is also not healthy to carry all our emotional baggage into our relationships.
How do we balance this out, then? For me, it came down to putting things down on paper. I always reflect much more clearly when I have a pen in hand.
There is no sugar-coating it: loving myself has always been hard. Over the years, I have worked hard on reconnecting with myself. The same way people can change and grow apart in a relationship, you can also lose sight of your sense of self. I know I did, and I am still working on fixing what I broke.
Losing Yourself To Love
I convinced myself he was the love of my life. I fell hard, fast, without a second thought. He always made me feel a certain way: excited, but unsure — emotionally unsafe. My heart beat so fast when he was around that I often feared it would just stop. He felt larger than life. Even if I did not realise it at first, he was casting a shadow over me.
It started small. The fact that I was busy meant that I didn’t care about him enough. If I did not reply to his texts within minutes, he would ignore me for days. He took my journal without my knowledge and mocked my writing.
Even now, writing about it, despite the fact that this love is long, long gone, my heart still beats fast — out of fear. It took me years to realise that the excitement I felt was dread that at any given moment he would just fall out of love with me.
When inevitably he cheated, he made a point of telling me all about it, for the sake of being “honest”. I was devastated and broke things off, which apparently was a surprise — he thought I would grant him forgiveness. I did not.
At least not then.
After so much sadness I wanted to invite joy back into my life. I made time for me. I did things I enjoyed. I was finally living for myself, no longer menaced by his scrutiny. Many months had passed and I was slowly picking up the pieces of me.
My newly found confidence brought him back to my life — and I allowed it, so I am as responsible for what happened next. (I say responsible and not guilty because I don’t think I should be blamed for his shortcomings. I can only account for my actions.)
This became a sort of dysfunctional pattern: he would disappear for months on end, only to reappear whenever I was almost happy without him.
I do not know why he kept coming back. Every time he did, it felt like I was walking on a very unstable bridge, stretched over a deep cliff.
There were happy moments, though. Just a few, but they filled me with such Hope! Sadly, it did not take him long to break every last piece of my Soul.
Before, he had been bothered by my insecurities. Now, he felt threatened by my confidence. I no longer accepted to be punished like a child. I no longer ran to him after a fight — his feelings might have been hurt, but mine had value too. I wanted to talk things out, he just talked over me.
First, he cheated on me for not being enough of a woman. Then, he cheated on me again for being too much of a woman. (His words, not mine, and he did not mean them as a compliment).
We ended up parting ways — for good this time. I remember feeling in excruciating pain and at same time, completely numb.
Then, five years went by.
Finding Yourself Through Love
When I met my current partner, I was cautious, very cautious. I was not willing to let anybody else break me again. That was a price I was no longer willing to pay for Love.
Was I in the perfect frame of mind and heart when we first got together? No, I was still healing.
What my previous partner had destroyed, my current partner helped rebuild, on a much stronger and reliable foundation.
In this Love, I was given room to find (and even discover new parts of) myself.
We each lifted different veils at different times, reassured by the other’s willingness to be vulnerable. Despite our battle scars, we still had Hope. Our Love grew slow but determined. Our relationship has not been perfect but is balanced and it makes me happier than I have ever been.
I may have lost myself to love once, but it has also allowed me to find a way back to myself.
Relationships fail for the most varied reasons, therefore the relationship you have with yourself is not exempt from failure.
However, this does not mean you are not worthy of Love. It simply means you carry a little more emotional baggage. Nothing wrong with that, as long as you keep decluttering along the way.
While it may be true to some that you need to love yourself before you can love somebody else, to me this feels… incomplete.
I think a better way of putting it would be “Give your Love to others, but make sure to keep some for yourself. You matter too.”
This is my response to today’s prompt: “What happens when you commit to relationships with those who aren’t growing?” To me, it resulted in deep loss, disconnect — from myself and from others — and a heartache so deep it took me years to pick up the pieces. Eventually I did, and even though the cracks are still visible in certain angles of light, I am no longer ashamed of them. Thank you @Diana C. for a prompt that took me through yet another great reflection of my healing journey!
