I’ve been dating more this year, and it’s been deeply revealing. Not just of what I like, but of everything I still fear. All my soft spots. The anxious little girl inside me who is as terrified of rejection as she is wired to expect it. I could let the pain that the possibility of love has surfaced swallow me whole—or I could just… hold it. Let it show me what still hurts. And then, give myself permission to try. To love and be loved anyways.
So many of my day-to-day choices have been shaped by fear. By trying to avoid future regret. I get stuck projecting from this moment to some hypothetical future—anticipating when someone might decide to leave, or pretend they never knew me—and then I decide in the here and now, if it’s even worth staying until that moment.
What I want to give myself, sometimes even more than the perfect outcome to my decisions, is freedom.
Not being grateful because if you’re not, God, the universe, spirit—whatever—will take everything from you. But maybe feeling grateful precisely because you’re not required to be. Because you can be as disbelieving, and scared, and anxious as you are, and good things still happen anyway. That’s how loved you are. That’s how lucky you are. The realization—the relief—that comes from allowing and receiving anyway is the closest thing I’ve felt to the kind of gratitude–peace that fear-based thinking always dangles one step in front of me.
We’ve been so conditioned to believe that we have to arrive at some perfectly healed version of ourselves before we’re allowed to want love, let alone receive it. But that’s not love. That’s a contract written in scarcity and signed in shame. And I’m done signing it.
Loving yourself should be so much more than a strategy for earning love from other people. And when we challenge the belief that we have to be healed enough, whole enough, to love or be loved, we can begin to see self-love for what it really is: an affirmation of pre-existing worth. Worth that isn’t conditional. Worth that isn’t for anyone else.
How perverse is it that we live in a world where loving yourself has been reduced to just another task on a checklist—a prerequisite for being accepted, appreciated, or seen as good enough?
This has been the most grounding realization as I’ve faced the voice in me that says I’m too anxious, too scared, not healed enough for love. I know how much work I’ve done on my anxiety. I know the volume of effort I put into staying, connecting, being present, even when fear is humming underneath. And I know those fears didn’t appear out of nowhere—they are the cost of surviving in spaces that weren’t built for me. The product of trying to fold myself into versions I never chose. It’s not my fault that the fear shows up. It’s also not my job to wait until the fear is gone before I get to try, to connect, to open.
The idea that we need to be whole before I can be loved sounds empowering on the surface, but really it’s just another version of the same cage. It’s still the bar that says “Not yet. Not until.” It’s another task on the list of ways we must be better before we can be embraced.
The cruelest part is that even as we reject one set of standards, we replace them with new ones. We make healing the new scale. Make recovery the new performance. Turn “doing the work” into the new reason why we don’t deserve love unless we’re working hard enough at being whole. That’s not freedom. That’s another trick. And I’m done with it.
Healing isn’t the toll we pay to cross into love. It isn’t a purity test. It isn’t another exclusionary checkpoint we have to pass through to deserve closeness. And I don’t want to turn healing, or trauma, or self-love into yet another reason why I don’t get to have what I need.
Because, the truth is, I don’t know if the wounds I carry will ever go away. The scars from never fitting, from being invisible and hyper-visible— too much and never enough. The memories of family and friendship and school, all those years of squeezing into too-small versions of myself. The too-muchness of my body, my voice, my feelings. Of relationships that said “I love you,” while also saying “Make yourself smaller.”
For me, there’s pain imbued even in the idea of love, of acceptance, of belonging—because I have rarely felt allowed to just have those things, freely. They’ve felt withheld, conditional, rationed. And maybe that’s okay— or, at least, maybe it isn’t a personal failure. Maybe wanting a soft place to land doesn’t disqualify me from receiving it. Maybe I don’t have to build a new religion around pretending I don’t want these things that I feel I need the most. I can admit the wanting. I can go after it anyway. Even if I’m not done healing. Even if I never will be.
What if I could hold pain, and fear, and insecurity—and still be worthy of love? What if I could be loved anyway?
Maybe this me, trying to make space for all of myself—my cavernous emotions and unruly desires—is proof that the love I deserve exists. That I’m already receiving it, at least in part, from me.
Maybe I can still be worthy of love, even with all my cracks. Maybe I don’t have to unbreak the broken.
I’m learning to honor the truth: I live with a lot of fear. I rarely feel emotionally safe around others. My mind is so often riddled with anxiety, that I lose track of time–that I forget anxiety is there, that I mistake it for reality. Being in relationship is hard for me. Trusting that other people can and will care enough to try not to hurt me is hard for me. Even as I write this, my mind whispers that trust is a sure road to regret. Being in relationship while also knowing there is no guarantee that I won’t be hurt (in fact I probably will be) is hard for me.
And still: I love anyways. I show up anyways. I care for others anyways. I do it scared. I meet the very outcome I fear most, often, and try again anyways.
Somehow, this untidy truth feels more sacred, more awe-inspiring, than the myth of being unscathed.
There’s proof in the trying. In the fact that I don’t know if or how it’ll change—but I still keep going. I still pull softness and understanding and hope from places they shouldn’t exist. I still laugh. I still open. I still show up. I try.
That’s magic. That’s beauty. That’s something worth loving.
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