The Strength In Our Scars

by Bianca Sparacino

I am a firm believer in there being beauty in the contrast. In the light and the dark days. In the hope and the hurt. In the fire and in the ash. I am a firm believer in the fall and in the rise; in the sin and in the saving. I am a firm believer in the broken, the people who hold their pieces together with belief, who bandage their fear in faith. I am a firm believer in the souls who have always managed to protect their soft; who have always known, even when it ached the most, that their wounds were healing them, that the hardest parts of life were growing them from the inside. I am a firm believer in there being beauty in the contrast—you have not lived until you have died.

The world is going to give you beauty, but it will also give you pain. The greatest lesson you will ever learn is that this, too, is a gift.

Look at it all from a place of healing, and choose to create yourself again. Shape your spine, stronger this time. Shape your heart, bigger this time. Shape your eyes, capable of seeing more than you ever imagined. Shape your mouth; give it the capacity to say all of the words you never allowed yourself to say. Begin again.

Your body is more than just a graveyard for those who could not love it. Your heart is more than just a cemetery for those who disappeared.

From time to time, trace the scars life has left you. It will remind you that at one point, you fought for something. You believed.

Life has taught me that the people who often love the hardest are the ones who have been hurt the most.

It took me a long time to realize that not everything in life is meant to be a beautiful story. Not every person we feel something deep and moving with is meant to make a home within us, is meant to be a forever. Sometimes, people come into our lives to teach us how to love; and sometimes, people come into our lives to teach us how not to love. How not to settle, how not to shrink ourselves ever again. Yes, sometimes people leave—but that’s okay, because their lessons always stay, and that is what matters. That is what remains.

Please, whatever you do—just feel what you are feeling right now. Do not reach into yourself and pull out what life has planted within you. Instead, reach into yourself and cradle it. Give it a home within you. Let is stay for as l...

Be thankful for the morning light and how it hits that one spot on your bed that holds the ghosted memory of someone who was once your favorite thing.

They left because they convinced themselves that there would always be another, someone better suited, someone better looking, someone more successful; it would only ever be a matter of time.

They left because they finally understood how cruel it truly was to love something that death could touch.

They left you because they never saw devotion win, they never saw passion triumph.

No, they didn’t leave you because they didn’t love you. They left you because they didn’t love themselves enough to believe that they could be different.

How they make you feel says a lot about them and nothing about you. Trust me when I say someone who makes you question if you are worthy of being loved is not worthy of being loved by you.

There is nothing wrong with vulnerability, with being human, for that is what creates depth within our relationships, and that is what ultimately unifies us.

You can say you have healed not when you have forgotten, but when you have forgiven.

Please, don’t ever forget—even when you ache all over, even when the world is not kind—you are needed here. You are needed.

You guard yourself from sadness, not realizing that you have closed yourself off to all of the happiness the world is trying to give to you. Stay open; it is how the light gets in.

The things that hurt you may have left scars, but they did not destroy you. You survived, and there is hope in that.

But loving someone when they are wearing their flaws like an apology, when they are breaking down, or when they are carrying hurt within them—that is when it means the most. That is when you must show up for them.

Too many people selfishly take hearts into their own hands and they fail to protect them, they fail to nurture them. Too many people grow comfortable and complacent; they lose sight of what they have. They take and take, and they rarely think about what they are giving. They forget that love is not something that should ever be done with one foot out the door. They forget that love should never be given in bare minimums.

You are the only person who gets to decide if you are happy or not—do not put your happiness into the hands of other people.

All that matters is that you are happy with the person you are becoming. All that matters is that you like yourself, that you are proud of what you are putting out into the world.

You get to be your own validation. Please don’t ever forget that.

All of the love you have given to the wrong people— it will find its way back to you.

The people who break you are not the ones who are going to put you back together.

You are your own home—please don’t ever forget that.

If the world does not understand the way you burn, do not hide yourself away.

Instead, set it on fire. Show them what you can do with all of that hope inside of you.

Listen—sometimes courage is as simple as opening your eyes in the morning. Sometimes it’s as easy as making the effort to eat your breakfast without spelling their name in your cereal or breaking your teeth on their goodbyes.

Sometimes your mountain to climb is made up of weekdays and months, made up of pushing yourself forward even when you want to nestle into the past.

Sometimes courage is a quiet fight, a dim softness within you, that flickers even on your darkest days and reminds you that you are strong, that you are growing—that there is hope.

Fall in love with someone who will take care of you—not in a materialistic way, but rather, fall in love with someone who will take care of your soul. Fall in love with someone who will take care of your mind, someone who will take care of your heart. Fall in love with someone who will take care of even the most chaotic parts of who you are.

Sometimes, healing consists of sitting in coffee shops and writing the years from your mind. Sometimes, healing is laughing until you cry; it is kissing your friends’ faces and being moved and inspired by your life. And sometimes, healing is rest; it is hiding from the world, it is having everything inside of you be still and quiet and eerily bare. Sometimes healing feels like nothing at all, like you are a silhouette of hope and hurt at the same time. Do not fight it. ...

Healing forces you to embrace the silence in the steps, the fact that you have to hang your coat in a different place from now on.

Healing forces you to change, to leave behind the familiar. Healing forces you to rebuild.

When you continue to beg for the kind of love you have been giving someone all along, you close yourself off to the person who dreams of being your favorite thing; you close yourself off to the person who eagerly awaits a heart like yours—no matter how loudly it beats against your chest, no matter how messy or sensitive or soft it is.

When you continue to chase those who do not want to be caught, you rip out pieces of your soul just trying to make it fit into the palms of someone who does not want to hold you.

Be brave enough to heal yourself even when it hurts.

Just focus on the things that make you feel glad you are alive; focus on the things that feed your soul, and not only will you experience love—you will become it.

But most of all, I hope you have the courage to forgive yourself for all of the times you did not have the courage to believe that you deserved more than the kind of life you were settling for.

I hope you find the kind of love that makes you a softer person.

Nothing is more beautiful than loving someone who builds you a home in their heart.

Sooner or later you are going to fall back in love with your life. Sooner or later your chest isn’t going to weigh heavy like an anchor within your body. Sooner or later, you will remember the lightness, the days that didn’t end in aching, and that is when you will realize it, that is when you will understand—you survived.

Even at your best, you will not be good enough for someone who does not have the capacity, or the will, to love you. However, and this is the part you must focus on—none of that matters. For even at your worst, when you are not a shining example of everything you want to be, when life is handing you hardships and hurt, the person who is right for you will still choose you. Even when you do not deserve it, the person who is right for you will still love you.

Your heart is a fragile thing that people have not handled with care, but this does not mean that you should turn around and break someone because you have been broken. Do not become the kind of person who hurts. Do not let the world make you hard.

If they walk away, do not focus on the pieces of you that are missing, do not focus on the empty; the only way to survive the leaving is to love whatever is left of yourself, is to love whatever remains.

Sometimes, it’s the people who have been hurt the most who refuse to be hardened in this world, because they would never want to make another person feel the same way they have felt. If that isn’t something to be in awe of, I don’t know what is.