I May Have Loved You At My Worst, But You Helped Me Become My Best

A sad soul was what I was.

Accustomed to the loneliness, I resigned myself into feeling it as a reminder of living.

And then you came.

Okay, yes, I wasn’t always subdued. There was a phase in my existence that I was happy, genuinely happy, until I started putting myself out there and got torn down bit by bit—unintentionally, maybe, but most of the time I’d say deliberately.

Meeting you was like an alarm that went off. I hit snooze right away, prolonging what obviously was inevitable. I kept reminding myself that you would just be another long, sappy article, something that I have always been familiar with writing about, always ending with sentences about how much I’ve tried and how things will get better. Who am I kidding? They never got better.

But of course, my heart was like that of a foolish teenage girl who also hoped that maybe this time would be different. At least when it came to that, for once I was right.

It wasn’t a walk in the park. I was never easy to deal with. I had episodes that even I didn’t want to cope with. Another insecurity I fed, another doubt I catered to. All of these blew up in my face because you made it clear that you weren’t going to be like them—you wouldn’t put up with it and you wouldn’t own up to it. You weren’t going to let me feel how I felt before. Self-pity turned into anger and disappointment towards myself. It wasn’t ideal, but it was what I needed.

You made me throw in the towel way too many times, only to find myself picking it up and wiping the mess I’d made. You made me realize how it had always been me against myself. How the sadness that had lived inside, the depression and uneasiness, the perception of how lowly I am, was there because I nourished every inch of it, all from the things that had passed and couldn’t be reversed. I lived expecting the lurking pain, saying how it would always end up the same way, only to be served by you with the harsh reality that I made its path towards me.

You walked in with your head held high in your usual confidence; you didn’t need to say it. You meant well. You weren’t there to impress me, you were there to help me accept the truth.

Funny how I feared rejection all my life when I was the one who’d been dismissing myself all this time. And I would never have even come to this realization if it weren’t for you rejecting the kind of relationship I handed you.

I still wake up everyday feeling the emptiness, but mostly because of how I’ve been working on myself. It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s a work in progress that I’m proud of.

Could you believe that? I went from just completely giving up a year before you to finally working on trying again to find my happy heart, the one that was lost in the series of unfortunate events that made me think I could never be worthy of anyone’s affection. Is it too cheesy to say that you made me believe in myself again?

I’m not utterly convinced that I’m a thousandfold better now, and I can’t completely assure you that I’ll always be happy or even okay. But loving you in my current state made me want to work on my flaws.

There will still be days that I’ll wake up with a heavy heart, but on most days it’s no longer pitch black. Each day, I’ll wake up feeling hopeful for something good, if not better. And I have you to thank for that.

I may have loved you at my worst, but you taught me in the best way on how to love myself again.