This Is Me Rewriting My Love Story

I’ve always told myself stories. I can quietly admire the beautiful woman sitting at the counter in my local cafe and, moments later, decide that she’s a French actress trying to make her mark on New York City. As incredible as it can be to live in my imagination, I drag this fiction into my own personal life in ways that always ends with my tears dripping over multiple bottles of wine.

Because when you choose to live in a world where the lies you tell yourself are the truth, you ensure that your life will be a fucking mess. When you uproot yourself from reality like this, you tell a story that your wounds are writing for you. Like actively choosing someone who you know will never choose you back.

You see, because I am drawn to tepid, I go for the luke-warm kind of love, the kind that constantly reminds me that I’m only into them because they will never really be into me. I process unavailability as love because I myself am unavailable. And this makes sense right? Because you attract what you are, not what you want, and what I am is wired for bad love.

The only kind of people that are attracted to hurt people are hurt people themselves.

Of course, this discovery laid dormant for most of my adult dating life. I went for the men with shirtless mirror selfies, ranking 10/10 on my attractive scale, and then being utterly confused and hurt when six pack abs in a cut off t-shirt didn’t return my phone call or disappeared as fast as he came the night before.

I blame these men for not being mature enough, stable enough, or ready enough for something bigger than 2 a.m. spent under sheets that smell like old whiskey. But the common denominator here is me. What this is and always has been is me caring at the cost of self-sacrifice. My codependency took the form of thinking I could change these kind of men. That I could pull the personal growth from them, that even though they couldn’t see God in themselves, they could find it in me, a human woman.

It sounds like I just care a lot, right? That I want people to do and be better, but at the root of it all is this simple fact,

I don’t believe I am worthy of love, so I’ll never choose someone who can actually love me.

And this stems from somewhere, obviously. Maybe a childhood of watching the two people I love most in this world decide they weren’t worthy of each other’s love. Maybe it’s because the only man whose hand I ever wanted to hold also used that hand to turn my flesh black and blue. There’s an entire bag of fucked up circumstances we could unpack here, or I could simply forgive and acknowledge the fact that I’ve let my heartbreak wire me this way. Through this I can now actively choose to unlearn.

It’s time to seperate my idea of love from the experience of love I have had. It’s time to choose myself first. I can no longer allow myself to not be celebrated in a relationship, starting first with the one I have with myself. I have to be love in order for love to find me.

I have to rewrite my love story. This time, it has to be rooted in truth.