The Importance Of Allowing Yourself To Truly Love
A story about Loving, Dreaming & Changing for the better
Shit. This is just crazy. Too much to take.
It is what it is. I’m a lover. I’ve been diagnosed with one of the most dangerous and powerful diseases on earth: Love. I was made to love. I love to love. And, since I truly love, I always put my heart before my mind.
During my short life, I have come to learn that instead of trying to hold on to it, we should be giving away the creative love burning and bursting inside us. I believe in the: “the more you give, the more you get”, a strange law of the universe, one might argue. Do you believe in it? I believe that, even if not in the shorter term, you end up having what you deserve. Not more, even if you gave 1000% of yourself, not less, even if you think you weren’t worth enough. It may be a consequence of a previous failure. A punch in the face can make you grow and become deeper about life.
But let me tell you when, in my opinion, this is especially true: when you truly love. Keep this in mind, because you’re gonna understand why I’m saying some real shit here.
Now, without any doubt, I love my family and best friends, they have been instrumental in influencing the path of my life and they keep being a solid presence.
However, the Love I’m referring to, through this short but intense auto-biographical story, is that inspirational, unbelievable, spiritual feeling we might be lucky to taste during our love relationships and it’s what John Legend wisely articulate through his poetic songs “Dreams”, “You&I”, “For the first time”, “All of me” etc. etc.
Love is a feeling.
I’m gonna talk about “how” I loved. Not who. Not why. This is my personal tribute to the power of authentic Love.
To me, genuinely loving someone is able to define what and how you dream, how you change, what you do and how you do it (dream, change, act).
In the future, I might speak about the importance of allowing yourself to truly dream and allowing yourself to truly change: as I see it, truly loving is a necessary condition not only for truly dreaming and truly changing but also for understanding why it’s important to truly dream and truly change.
But before that, you need to allow yourself to do it.
Think about it: you’re working hard. It’s a really really tough period. You’re suffering. Or maybe it’s all good. But this is not the point. The point is that it happened you started to be in love with someone and you allowed yourself to exploit this feeling as much as you could. For real.
So, I bet now you are facing your life totally in a different way, aren’t you?Just the thought of that someone you are in love with is making you face reality with a stronger and proactive attitude. Just the thought of that someone you are in love with is making you work harder, even on yourself. You’re appreciating what you are doing because you’re doing it for your muse. You’re having visions about your future — visions that are becoming goals — and your Love is starting to be part of them. You’re creating a strategy in order to achieve your ambitions. You’re becoming someone you are proud of because you’re not afraid of changing for the better. You’re truly growing because you opened yourself to Love.
Therefore, trust me:
How you love is going to build up yourself and your purposes in life and eventually, when you let yourself to truly love who you are doing something for, you are going to make it, not matter what.
Love is your engine.
You know, it’s like a math formula: truly growing=f[truly dreaming +truly changing+truly acting], where truly dreaming=z(truly loving), truly changing=w(truly loving) and truly acting=y(truly loving)
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If you keep reading, I owe you something;)
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Well, let’s go back now to my story.
For those of you who didn’t know, I split my summer time working between LA and Chicago, and have recently moved to Copenhagen for an internship program. Why? I don’t feel ashamed to say this.
Few months ago, I made this choice out of Love. To literally follow someone I loved.
You know, I just didn’t want a love situation to stop because of the natural course of events (a campus abroad, an erasmus, an internship, different careers, distances, places, etc. etc.). You know, I didn’t want to regret I couldn’t be able to fight for Love. As Leo said in The Vow: “How do you look at someone you love and tell yourself it’s time to walk away?”
I didn’t want to prevent myself from truly loving. I didn’t want to let it go. Our emotional intelligence is more rational than what we think.
Actually, even if I’m only 23 years old and I should say “fuck Love, I’m gonna enjoy my life”, I realized I’ve been living for the past 2 years for the sake of it. One day, I got the chance to have the Time of my life and I remember I told myself “No, I’ve never felt like this before. Don’t let her go for any reason”.
AlI I have been wanting to do was to show who I was genuinely in loved with that I believed in something bigger than my individual self.
That’s why I developed the need to involve somebody I cared about in this race: an intense journey driven by a dreaming attitude. I knew that “dreaming” and “loving” at the same time had the power to create miracles. I started dreaming about achieving my latent and full potentiality (what I was supposed to be), with the self-confidence that I didn’t have to give up on my new visions because of Love. I just needed to “re-direct” my journey in order to let my heart be satisfied and fed. And you know what? I feel blessed for this opportunity: even if everything has changed, today, I can say I’m headed in the right direction to reach my whole potential.
The Love I explored for that person allowed me to do my best. I swear it’s the truth.
I used to wake up every fucking day with a thought: “What can I do today to impress this person?”.
Love is an action.
The solution was always the same: “Well Borg, you can let your dreams be real. You can listen to your heart — beating like a drum, and you can sing together with it. You can show that you are not only a romantic dreamer, but especially an achiever. You can take this person higher and higher, ’til the cloud nine.” Every fucking day.
So, I found my entire self. I found it again. And Nothing was the same. Being to give, Giving to become. Cause at the end of the day, loving someone else makes you understand how to love yourself. When you decide to open your heart, listening to your heart becomes easy, normal.
I wasn’t scared to just listen to and discover my essence, I wasn’t scared to dream and translate everything into something real, I wasn’t scared to accept myself changing. “Trust me, trust me, don’t be scared, I can do it. I really can. Don’t be afraid of the future. What’s the point in being scared?”. I used to say.
Love is an attitude.
Now, not matter if “all of me” wasn’t enough and something didn’t work (situations, timing, priorities). This is not relevant anyway. You need to accept failures in Love too.
I mean, it’s so important that you allow yourself to love, even unilaterally and unequally: most of the art we have — songs, poems, paintings, etc — is a consequence of a one-sided emotion.
But listen to me: at some point, you’ll realize you’ve played all your cards and you’ll have to draw the line of determination from desperation. Only at that point, you’ll need to let it go.
I was like “What did I do wrong? Why am I such a fucking romantic asshole?
Then, fortunately, it is a question of whether one regards the glass as being half full, or as being half empty.
I realized every cloud have a silver lining.
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Don’t miss this part, it’s the most important of your life;)
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Indeed, if I’m here now it is because of Love.
I did what I did, I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m achieving what I’m achieving, because I was inspired by Love and I wanted to prove it. Because I allowed myself to truly love.
That’s why authentic Love is always good and refreshing. It makes the “the more you give the more you get” real.
Ok, Love made me suffer (now I’m fine) and I’m aware that after I was hurt I needed to protect my heart and I was tempted to feel offended and nurse a grudge. But let me say this:
Forgetting the past or not opening your heart to the future will sometime cause you to miss out on the blessings and opportunities that you experiment and that are meant for your life.
And Love honored me with something big. Even if I can’t completely share with my past muse what I’m accomplishing right now, I can celebrate what I used to share (the best moments of my life), without being and feeling hateful. Even if I wasn’t able to make the most skeptical a believer, I can celebrate what destiny allowed me to live.
I have the duty to celebrate. Why? “Look at the kid now, Mannnn!”. Now more than ever, I know who I am and what I’m doing in my life and I’m happy with the man I’m becoming.
I moved my ass from my comfort zone to an-only-dreamt-land and I grew the fuck up. In the last two years, that young kid and teenager, who loved swimming every single day of his life, has come back and he’s now more complete, more mature. There is not much time for sleep now: who can and would sleep when building something from zero and developing ideas from scratch, while studying and completing an hard-core and enriching internship?
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You made it, but even this last part is super important;)
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Because yes, I’m about to launch my first start-up — FashTime — craaaazily soon. Yes, you read well, I said “first”: it’s just the beginning, I have so many surprises for you;)
Entrepreneurial attitude (or pursuit) is the most important gift (but not the only one) Love blessed myself with.
Well, maybe it was a matter of DNA and education too. But Love fired me up and helped me to recognize it and push it hard.
This journey started exactly 2 years ago (more than 200 packs of m&m’s ago, 1 every 3 days — I love them).
I came up with the first scratches of the first business plan of my career and I pitched my first idea ever. Such a bad experience. But I learned from that. After almost 2 years of business planning of a new idea, brainstorming sessions, calls, meetings, sketches until 4am, doors shut in my face, cries, pitches, finally I can say that my start up is no more just a dream.
It’s been hard, but incredibly inspirational. I had to start from the bottom but I was willing to show my true value to someone I was in love with. I promised I would make it and I made it. That’s it.
So, even if I’m in Copenhagen in the shitty weather, on my shitty bike, even if I’m alone with my deep self (God may bless Skype), I can’t help but feeling the heat.
If you spent time reading this, wow, thank you :)
Time. What a valuable and undefinable thing, uh? If you say “I don’t have time”, it actually means I don’t want, I don’t care, I don’t like it. Reality is that the best gift you can give to someone is your Time.
So, thank you. If you either share or recommend this, you will make me, Borg, happy. It took me almost 1 month in order to let you know what and how I feel and I’m glad I was able to do it in the best way possible. #allme
Dream like Lovers do and it might come true.
If you play all your cards right, your luck’s gonna strike. And if somebody is gonna tell you “You changed” remember to answer back “Why didn’t you?”. #LovingDreamingChanging
Ps. Just one last thing, if this can make sense to anyone: we legally founded the start-up the 15th of September. An unbelievable and meaningful date, not a random one;) #destiny
This story was published in Startime, the new way of perceiving startups and startuppers. Follow us 😎
About what you’ve just read: Notes from the Author — Marco Borgato:
A story about Loving, Dreaming & Changing for the better.
‘Mentionable Rants’ is about negativity. ‘The importance of allowing yourself to truly love’ is instead about that part of my heart journey where I decided to make a step back, acknowledge the past, react, re-discover myself and find a new life purpose.
Through this intense biographical story, I talk about how I loved, not who, not why. I acknowledge the power of allowing ourself to truly love. I show what True Love for one person means and what it’s capable of achieving.
Again, all good things come to an end. I’m humble to recognize FashTime, together with my recent vocation toward entrepreneurship, as the result of that inspirational genuine love I experienced during the previous months.
