A Gentle Reminder

by Bianca Sparacino

This love, it will show you that you were always worthy of it, that you always deserved to be seen and understood, that you always deserved to be held and cared for the way you held and cared for all that came before it. This love will teach you — that you were never too much. You were always enough. You were always enough.

You were never asking for too much. You were simply just asking the wrong person.

Sometimes, it’s extremely difficult to see change, to see that difference within your own soul and your own desires as a good thing. But it is a good thing; it’s the best thing, because it means that you’re learning.

And more importantly — be the person who changes. Because when you are the person who changes, it means you are the person who is growing.

Wish for change. It doesn’t mean that you’re lost. It means that you’re finding yourself.

Forgive yourself for giving your heart to those who could not love it or value it. Forgive yourself for falling for the wrong people. Because they weren’t the wrong people — you were meant to meet them, you were meant to fall for them, you were meant to experience them and learn from the lesson.

Maybe you wish you would have seen the signs earlier, that you could have walked away before the damage was done, before the lesson was learned in a really hard and haunted way.

Now you know what you do not want. Now you know what you do not want to feel.

Forgive yourself for taking your love back. Forgive yourself for outgrowing certain people in your life.

Forgive yourself for all of the times you tore up pieces of your own heart in order to mend another human being, hoping that it would heal them and nourish them and make them better or happier.

Forgive yourself for wanting to save the people you loved.

Understand that sometimes, in order to do that, you have to walk away. Because you cannot fix the people you love. You cannot heal th...

You were not put into this world to fix people who do not want to be fixed. It is okay to walk away from relationships that require you to do so. Forgive yourself for that.

Forgive yourself for the way you treated yourself in the past. For the way you talked to your body. For the way you vilified the way your mind worked when you were dealing with anxiety, or overthinking, or depression, or anything that was haunting it.

Forgive yourself for the way you settled for less than what you wanted, or desired, or knew you needed, because you didn’t think you deserved it; because you convinced yourself, somewhere along the lines, that you were not worthy of beauty in life, that you were not worthy o...

Forgive yourself for all of the things you didn’t say, or didn’t wear, or didn’t do because you were afraid of how it would make you look, because you were afraid of what others might think of you.

Forgive yourself for the ways in which you saved yourself. Forgive yourself for doing whatever you had to do to ensure that you made it to see another day.

It is okay if you hid from the world.

Be gentle with yourself. You were learning. You still are.

Maybe the universe fights for certain souls to find one another.

And maybe the universe places people in your life just to take them away, just to teach you the things that beauty cannot.

Maybe it is through caring for those who make us feel like we are hard to love that we are taught how to embrace those who see us, those who truly protect our souls.

We want to protect the people we fall in love with.

We do this because we see so much of ourselves within those we give our hearts to.

We may not have been broken in the same way, weathered in the same way, but we still feel a sense of belonging to them, a sense of being understood.

In a way, it is through loving those broken pieces within another human being that we are kinder to the pieces that ache in the same ways within ourselves.

We are all on this Earth just trying to figure ourselves out, just trying to mend the breaks in our souls,

You cannot keep pouring your love into a heart that is closed off to it. It will only leave you empty.

And when you teach yourself that you deserve to be loved, without having to beg for that love, without having to chase that love down, you open yourself to the kind of beauty that chooses you just as freely as you choose it.

You open yourself to new beginnings, to a future that unfolds in ways that don’t hurt or break you down, but rather build you up and show you just how worthy you are of having your heart held.

Maybe you will never get back to the person you used to be.

Maybe that is something to celebrate, something to embrace, because who you were is a version of yourself that exists in the past.

Maybe you have to stop looking backwards.

The truth is, when you settle for an almost, you settle for almosts in every single aspect of a relationship. Almost happy. Almost valued. Almost chosen.

But you deserve more than that. You deserve certainty. You deserve to be someone’s favorite thing. You deserve effort, you deserve for the beauty you see within another human being to come to fruition, to be something substantial, to be something you can grow within.

Someone who wants the same things, someone who wants to meet all of your hope with action. You deserve someone who isn’t afraid of being responsible for your heart. You deserve someone who embraces it.

When you are not feeling good enough, remember that even at your best, you will not be good enough for someone who does not have the capacity, or the will, to love you.

It doesn’t matter how hard you fight for someone who isn’t fighting for you. It doesn’t matter how hard you show up for someone who isn’t showing up for you. It doesn’t matter — because those human beings don’t actually see you. If

Remember that you are the only person who gets to decide if you are good enough. You are the only person qualified enough to determine your value.

Please, do not put your happiness, or your self-love, or your belief, into the hands of other people or their validation or understanding of you.

Start paying attention to what you are, rather than what you aren’t. Start paying attention to the things you have, rather than the things you don’t. Remind yourself that you are someone’s favorite human being.

You deserve to be surrounded by people who grow your mind, people who make you better because they push you to be better.

You deserve to be chosen. You deserve to be loved the way you love others. At the end of the day, you deserve to be inspired by your life.

Do not lose yourself trying to love someone else.

It is better to be alone within yourself than to feel lonely within the home you built inside of another human being.

While I know you think there isn’t any beauty left in this universe for you — but what if there is? What if there is?

We hold on to those who cannot love us for so many reasons.

Sometimes, we hold on because we feel like we have to. We feel like we have to be the ones to fix, the ones to mend, the ones to prove that human beings don’t give up on a person they see something beautiful within.

And sometimes, we hold on because we think that we will never find the kind of person who proves to us that love is not something that is meant to hurt.

Because we would rather sleep beside someone who makes us feel lonely than to be alone.