Love is many things. Does many things. But love should never hurt so much.
Love is not making yourself small or reshaping yourself to fit someone else's needs.
Love is not sitting around to be your verbal punching bag.
Love is not saying you will stop hurting the person you care for and then just going right back to doing it. When you love someone, you don't escalate to physical harm.
When you love someone, you don't threaten their lives. When you love someone, you don't pick out flaw after flaw and make them feel lesser than who they are.
When you love someone, you don't let yourself or others make them feel worthless.
A person you love should never have to question their safety or sanity around you. They should never be made to feel like a burden. The person you love should never be so mentally and emotionally scarred by you that they finally break.
Because then, the person you say you love starts thinking that the love and patience and hope they have for you is not enough.
Then that person you say you love becomes broken and fed up with the same cycle. And eventually that person just can't keep fighting the same fight. Because they lost that will to fight for something that never changes.
My heart hurts. Everyday. For so long. Empty promises of change, just to go back to the same thing.
My heart hurts because it has to let go of all the hopes that it once had. When a person is the one doing the hurting, they don't see the damage they are causing.
How many times did I ask for change? How many times did I speak up about my pain? And how many times did everything go back to same old things?
I didn't want it this way. I never dreamed of it this way. But you broke me. You hurt my soul.
With every time you said something unkind about my appearance.
With every time you made me cry.
With every time you put your hands on me and then promises it would never happen again, and it did.
Every time you screamed at our little girl and made her cry.
Every time I had to comfort her for it.
Every time I was called a dumb bitch or a whore.
I wanted the fairytale.
I wanted the dream life.
I wanted the loving husband who could never cause his wife any ounce of pain.
I wanted so much that I let everything happen.
And each time I let all this happen over and over again.
It broke me more and more.
Until I looked in the mirror and didn't know who I was anymore.
Where was that vibrant, joyful, hopeful person?
Why did she let herself go?
Why did she try so hard to change herself?
Because of love.
Because she loved too much too fast.
Because she hoped that her love would be matched.
All her life she bent and conformed to what others needed of her.
And then she broke.
There is love. And there will always be love.
But now, she has to learn to love herself.
And she has to do it alone.
She has to find who she once was.
She has to reclaim her life.
And both have to realize that this love turned toxic.
Realize that this love was hurting them both.
Realize that they need to work on each other and love themselves before they can love others.
Love should be as easy as breathing.
Love should never make it hard to breathe.
Love should be cherished every second of every day.
Love should never be as bad as it was.
There will always be love.
But there can't be love where there has already been so much pain.
Love is pain someone once said.
But true pain is when you pour every ounce of love into a person who will always slip back to the ways that hurt you.
True love is finding and knowing your worth and never letting anyone make you question it again.
