Bianca Sparacino

At the end of the day, someone with anxiety overloves. They know what it is like to feel isolated, and so they want to give everything to another human being in order to ensure that they would never feel the same. Someone with anxiety has a mind that works to convince them lies surrounding their worth and their value. Therefore, being the person who holds their hand, who stands by their side while they fight to navigate their illness, who knows how to love them on the hard days — that reminds them that they deserve to be loved the way they love others. That reminds them that there are those out there who want to care for them correctly; that there are those who want to stay.

Moving on is difficult. When you care deeply, when you are the kind of person who gives everything you have to those you love, it can be extremely hard to lay all of that love down. Breakups make you question yourself, they make you question your reality. Nostalgia can be a powerful thing, memory can be hard to part with, and it will never be easy to fully say goodbye to those who made us feel deeply and connected and hopeful. Especially when you’re empathetic, especially when you’re a hopeless romantic. 

You deserve someone who genuinely sees in you what you see in them. You deserve someone who stays, who shows up, who isn’t wishy-washy with their feelings. You deserve someone who knows what they want. You deserve someone who is honest and genuine and who comes as they are. You deserve someone who never exhausts your heart in a bad way. You deserve someone who loves you the way you love them, who fights for you the way you fight for them.

I hope you have the courage to keep loving deeply in a world that sometimes fails to do so.

And you will grieve the past. You will grieve the small and nameless moments you took for granted, the quiet nature of a love you assumed you would always get to lean on. You will grieve the concept of time, of the way you let it slip away from you, of the way in which it moves so quickly once you connect with how special it is. You will grieve every day you did not spend diving into the heart of them, all of the ways in which you were too busy, or too cool, or too consumed to notice that lived for you.

Because when you are unapologetically yourself, when you stand up for who you are, what you want to create in this world, who you want to surround yourself with, the world opens up in a beautiful way.

Maybe right now, your journey is about being alone. Maybe this is the season you are being challenged — to learn how to wake up in the middle of the bed, to finally find hope in the vacancy, hope in the quiet, hope in the way you stretch into your life and give yourself permission to take up space within it. Maybe right now, you are being shown — that you can take care of yourself, that you can depend on the person you have become, that you can be your own home no matter what comes your way.

To be human is to understand that happiness isn’t a constant. But to be human is to understand that neither is sorrow, or grief, or heartache. To be human is to feel it all, to welcome the lessons that come with the dark days, to welcome the softness that comes from the lightness of what saves you. To be human is to try, with every inch of your patchwork soul, to be proud of who you are. To care. To heal. To be your own home, even on the days you don’t like yourself.

Take care of yourself. Be kinder to yourself. Make room for yourself every single day. Make time for yourself in your routine, be less passive in the ways you connect with your own soul. Just be gentle with yourself. Learn about yourself, and invest in the things that ignite you and make you feel good — because beauty is both mental and physical, it is something you have to work at each day.

I need you to know that you are the product of what is both hopeful and haunted within you, and it is okay to exist in this world as someone who is simply figuring out how to balance that.

Because at the end of the day, if someone does not meet you where you are, you cannot keep asking them to do so. If someone cannot reciprocate your love, if someone cannot give you what you truly deserve, you have to understand that aching for them to do so before they are ready is a form of self destruction.

If you have ever felt like your personality almost continuously attracts those who need guidance and help in life — you may be an empath.

And I know, I know — it is difficult when every tender part of who you are has been bruised and let down by the ones who never learned how to love you properly. But you must believe in this love the way it believes in you. You must trust it.

I need you to know that there are others like you in this world; others who are messy hearted, others who feel things intensely, and without hesitation, others who cannot contain all that they hold within the worlds of their mind because they have only ever known how to pour, how to shatter, how to give and give and give.

Instead, the eerie similarity between all of these male poetry accounts, is the fact that they use the female experience to promote themselves.

Do not hold any space in your heart for those who are not showing up to claim it. Instead, open yourself to the world, and allow for it to fill that space with the kinds of people, the kinds of moments, and the kinds of experiences that exhilarate you, that compel you — that make you love yourself.

I hope you forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made, for the past you keep alive inside of you. I hope you learn to let go — of the things you had to do in order to heal, or to grow, or to survive. You are doing your best. You are human. Please don’t ever forget that.

When you lose someone, you don’t just lose them once. You lose them every single day, you lose them slowly.