― Oscar Wilde
You’ve spent years building fortresses around your heart because you learned early that being seen was dangerous.
You found yourself drawn to familiar patterns — the dismissive boss who never quite sees your worth, the partner who forever keeps you at arm’s length, the friendships where you give endlessly but never receive.
You seek validation where it cannot be found. You orchestrate chaos because stillness feels like abandonment. You choose partners who require constant proving, because that’s the language of love you learned first.
You chase upheavals, mistaking it for intimacy.
You accept crumbs, believing they are the whole loaf.
You allow yourself to be diminished, hoping to finally be seen in your smallness.
You excel at loving broken things, at finding beauty in what others discard.
But the irony is you struggle to recognize when someone sees you whole.
You gravitate towards the cold comfort of the known. It’s a repetition compulsion, a subconscious attempt to rewrite the past, to finally receive the love and attention that were withheld.
Your intelligence became both a shield and a sword. You learned to predict pain before it arrived. To articulate wounds so precisely that intellectualizing them became a substitute for healing them. You learned to navigate the world through the mind while your heart waits.
When someone tries to love you, your first instinct is to explain why they shouldn’t. To list all the ways you’re too much or not enough. To prove your unworthiness with the precision of someone who has made a science of self-doubt.
But notice now — notice the ones who wait patiently at your walls. The ones who see your complexity and stay. The ones whose love comes without demands for performance or perfection. Their presence feels foreign, almost uncomfortable in its gentleness.
But your intensity isn’t “too much” for them — they recognize it. They see it. They delight in it.
They may not match you on all levels, they may not have your emotional sensitivity or your intellectual prowess, but they find joy in witnessing all of who you are.
Here is the invitation: Start small.
When your body feels safe — subtly, momentarily. In those quiet moments when your breath comes easy and your shoulders drop their armor — let that be your guide.
Notice how your body already knows what safety feels like. How it relaxes around certain people without your mind’s permission. Trust that ancient wisdom.
When you meet kindness, hold off the automatic reflex to deflect — even just for half a second.
When you feel a flicker of warmth in another’s presence, hold the urge to pull away. Even if the warmth is fleeting, even if the connection is imperfect, do not tighten around it.
There is no need to analyze it, question its validity, or compare it to some idealized version of love.
Simply allow.
There is profound courage in this simplicity — In standing still long enough to be loved. In allowing yourself to be a recipient rather than a constant provider.
You don’t need to understand their love completely. You don’t need to match it perfectly. Let it land.
Let go of the urge to perform, to compensate.
Learn to let love in, not as a reward for your accomplishments or a validation of your existence, but as a natural right, a reflection of your own inherent goodness.
Eventually, you would have learned to receive love in its imperfect forms. The friend who can’t match your depth but brings you soup when you’re sick. The partner who may not understand your theories but notices when your voice changes. The colleague who sees your dedication even if they don’t grasp your vision.
Let go of the need to be perfectly understood.
Let love meet you where you are. Let it be awkward, incomplete, human. Let it surprise you.
Let it be simpler than you imagined.
Let it come without having to earn it.
As for you: You don’t have to be extraordinary to be worthy of love. You don’t have to be wounded to be interesting. You don’t have to be useful to be valuable.
Your heart knows how to open. It remembers.
Even now, it remembers.
🐚
