Lauren Jarvis-Gibson

Block them. On everything. And anything. When you don’t see their pictures pop up everywhere on your newsfeed, you will start to adapt to a life without them.

One day you are going to wake up and realize you are over them. One day you aren’t going to be tied down to that person anymore, and you are going to be happy just with yourself.

When I was young, I figured by the age of 23, I would have everything figured out.

You deserve love on the days when you can’t get up in the morning and spend the day questioning your self-worth. You deserve love when you allow yourself to grieve unapologetically and without shame. You deserve love when you cry for the past, longing for something greater than what once was.

Being single on Valentine’s Day is not something to be ashamed or embarrassed about. In fact, I think it calls for a celebration.

Give yourself a little kindness. Know that you are doing your best and that is all that you can do right now. You aren’t going to feel like this permanently and life is going to move forward in a brighter and better direction.

The honeymoon stage is the time in your relationship when you believe your significant other is perfect. This is not love.

Thinking back on it, all of my life so far, I have let boys set my self-esteem and self-worth for me. And for what? For miserable nights picking out every flaw I thought they saw on me? For more miserable nights picking apart our conversations?

Stop telling yourself you aren’t enough, because you are. Stop telling yourself you will never find a love like that again, because you will. Stop telling yourself you are ugly, because you are beautiful and need to believe that. You are always, always enough.

Be the person you want to say hello to in the morning and goodnight to in the evening. Be the person you want to look in the mirror at and smile because you are glorious.

I became more confident because someone was confident in me. I became beautiful because he saw that I was and I believed him.

You can’t ever forget a first love, but you can let go of them eventually. You can’t ever forget a loved one who passed away, but you can eventually continue on with your life and heal. I wish there could be a magical spell to stop all the pain and memories, but that would be too easy wouldn’t it?

It’s exciting to have a significant other. It’s exciting to be in love. And it’s easy to spend more time with them than the other people in your life. But, please do me a favor and think about what you are doing.

They say “you know when you know” but I don’t think that’s entirely true. Sometimes, you want so badly to be in love that for the time being you think you are. You can confuse lust with love and love with lust in a relationship. You also could be trying to replicate a past love, trying to remember how it felt to be so desperately in love that it hurt.

As soon as you graduate, you are bombarded with new emotions and new information. At first, graduating feels like a dream. It hasn’t quite hit you yet and your adrenaline lasts a while after you get off the stage. Later, all your friends drink wine with you until you forget all the things you have to worry about later.

It’s so easy to do. And it happens all the time. You crave instant gratification and attention and you finally meet a boy who gives it to you.