We Feel Only as Much Love as We Allow Ourselves to

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

A plant cannot help but reach towards the sunlight, and something deep within humans cannot help but seek love.

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I never let myself receive love. Throughout all my life, with my own parents, my siblings, my friends and my lovers… there have been so many people who have loved me and yet I barely felt any of it. I never let myself receive love because I didn’t trust love, I didn’t trust people who said they loved me. Bad things tended to follow that statement. And because I didn’t love myself, I didn’t consider myself worthy of it.

My own fears and my own judgements blocked me from receiving love. Still, I still sought it out… I guess we all do, even if we are so resistant to it.

A plant cannot help but reach towards the sunlight, I think something deep within humans cannot help but seek love.

So, I always sought it out in the safest form I knew, praise. I worked hard to perfect myself, fixing myself and trying to better myself, even to the point of harming and denying myself to become something praiseworthy. Then I would show off what I had done, because the thing itself (the growth, the accomplishments) didn’t matter, all that mattered was that I got the praise (replacement for love) that I was looking for. I was starving for love and that was the closest thing that I could digest. But I never felt good doing this, the payoff was always meager and short-lived, like a dopamine hit. It always left me empty and needing more.

So I lived practically my entire life surrounded by people and yet alone and self-isolated by my own projections. Separated from all those who loved me and wanted so desperately to love me, but who I kept at a distance. I protected myself with my ‘good boy’ mask and only accepted love through that. How much love have I denied in my life and then acted like no one loved me properly? How many theories about love and aloneness had I conjured up just to justify and perpetuate my isolation?

How rarely had I let the world experience me in my beautiful, messy, authentic and passionate glory?

All my life I had denied my greatest gifts to the world, my self, my energy, my truth and my love, because I had been so terrified that it would be rejected, ridiculed or attacked. Living with fear is no way to live; it’s more of a slow march around the beating, bleeding, center of one’s life, never really diving in. Alone in the world and cut off from my real self and the source of real power. But, like this, I cannot keep going. It hurts too much, the cost is too great, and frankly the fear is inflated.

May I erase this belief:

What I am is not good enough, broken, incorrect and not worthy of love. That I need to suffer and struggle (alone) to perfect myself before I can enter the world and be of any good. That I need to be perfect to receive love.

May I replace it with this belief:

I am beautiful. I was born pure and worthy of love, but got fucked up by life events. The impressions they created and the patterns they set in motion are not me. I am life and love embodied as Carter and I want desperately to shine and share and partake in the world

May I live with this vow:

I will not suppress my life, I will not hide my truth, I will not block my love from pouring forth. I will feel my shit and honor my emotions, I will let my truth be seen, I will love my self through all of it and I will hold this same loving energy for others.

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