It’s Time To Fall Back In Love With Yourself

It’s time to take your love back from those who hurt you; from those who never understood how to protect someone who cared as deeply as you did. It’s time to take those pieces, the shards of heart and hope, from the hands of those who do not deserve to hold them any longer. It is time to believe that you are worthy of being whole again; that you are worthy of knitting yourself back together, day by day, fragment by fragment.

It is time to understand that you never had any say in how long someone stayed; you never had any say in how long someone loved you. There was nothing you could have done to stop them from walking away. Whether you silenced the thud of your heart against your ribcage, whether you spoke in a softer tone or made yourself fit into their lives like a square peg in a round hole, you never had any say in how long they were going to appreciate you. How long they were going to try.

However, you do have a say in how you rise; in how you pick yourself up from the debris of it all. You do have control over how you grow, how you build yourself from a foundation of ash and flame, from charred pieces of past and weathered old names.

So take it slowly. Start by taking back your favourite songs, the ones that always made you cry when they left. Take back your favourite coffee shop, the one you always went to together. Take back your favourite sweater, the one that always smelled like them. Then, calmly, take back your quiet — the thoughts you have when you are asleep, the conversations you share with the moon. Take back your beauty, the confidence that was once built on the bedrock of their approval. Take back your heart, no matter how battered and bruised it is, no matter how much it hurts.

I promise you will bloom again. I promise you will flourish. Trust me when I say that wildflowers grow in the oddest of places, between the cracks of memories, they gather strength within scar tissue, stretching toward the light, saying “We deserve to be here, no matter where we have come from.” Now it’s your turn.