my random rambles

The Journey Of Loving

Self-love comes from having the strength to cut the thorns that stick to your side—a painful, unending sting that can only be soothed from you and you alone.

Self-respect comes from understanding that what you desire does not make you impure or selfish, but instead, makes you a human being who knows what they want, and doesn’t falter to what those around them wants.

Having desires does not make you greedy, ugly, or wrong.

Desires breathe life into success, it pushes the boundaries around the ordinary and the extraordinary, it takes chances-- it lives.

Evey journey has no end, every journey has no right beginning, every journey is simply that—a journey. Some may find points in which they can rest, points in which they will lose hope, lose themselves, and lay vacantly-- and some will push through that vacancy until they can find themselves once again.

A journey is a never-ending cycle of self-deprecation and self-respect and mistakes and soundness and love and loss and destruction and restoration.

On the topic of vacancy: a feeling of emptiness you can feel wobble unsteadily up and down the top of your ribcage to the depths of your stomach. It’s a feeling that is hard to describe. It’s something you don’t notice until it happens again and again, the feeling of knowing your heart is breathing in your chest but not feeling its untiring push against your skin. You think, “maybe my heart is really missing, maybe it’s a phantom that only beats so I don’t die.”

Holding onto that vacancy, that empty feeling, can kill you. It can make you want to rip your chest open just to fill that hole with something—anything, that will make it feel whole.

Moving on from that feeling is almost impossible. Learning how to fill that hole is what matters, but the thing is; it never fills. It consumes and consumes and consumes and consumes and swallows up anything and everything—it is an unending hunger. Your heart wants what it can’t have, and it wants what it can have, and it will not stop breathing until it gets that, or until it doesn’t.

It’s human nature to let those desires fill that hole. It comes with learning how to love but not to obsess. It comes with learning how to respect but not idolize. It comes with learning how to cope but not ignore.

It’s important to love— but that comes along with understanding when you give too much love.

The feeling of that hole in your heart being too full, breathing too fast.

Those words from someone you loved too much.

Those words fully had time to rest in your chest.

Those words dug into your soul.
They forced their way down your throat and into your ribcage, they bounced and tinged back and forth until they seeped into your heart.

There was a dull ache for a second, and you're taken aback by how something that wasn’t physical could have that kind of strong, grabbing, physical effect on you.
It was a tang, a sort of dull sickness that sits and then writhes in the pit of your stomach. Some may even mistake it for the lightness of being overjoyed, except this feeling was darker and deeper and settled lower in your stomach, and the sensation lasts even after those words finally settle in.

They pour out of your skin-- in short little spurts they come back and squirm, squeeze, then release.

The feeling makes you want to vomit.
You know that every time you think of those words; every time you let them re-enter your skin, crawl their way down your throat and catch the air in your lungs and bounce around in your chest and rib cage and slide down into the pit of your stomach and rest and release and rinse and repeat, every time you think of those words, a part of you dies.

You’ll never forget words like that, and you’ll never forget a feeling like that. It’s more than a feeling—it’s an effect, an effect that comes from somebody else.

It’s an effect that comes from somebody you care so, so much about, so much so that those words will never leave you.

------------

It takes a lot to learn how to stop loving someone. Sometimes, it's even more difficult than falling in love.
As you grow older and realize how messed up things around you are-- the people, everything-- moving on gets easier. Moving on comes with learning how to love yourself, because you can only truly learn how to let go if you understand that the thing holding onto you in the first place isnt good for you. You are the only one who dictates what's good for you, and in return, you're the only person that can make your life better for yourself.

I loved someone who hurt me, and once I learned how to start loving myself, I learned that the person who I was in love with wasnt who I thought they were. I learned that I didnt have to love them.