Insights

Love is a sort of crazy experience. It displays itself in different ways: romantic or platonic, but it's powerful nonetheless. When I really break it down, whether love is romantic or platonic, it's side effects are the same. True love compels us. It moves us. It drives us. It motivates and changes. It challenges and accepts. It grieves and celebrates. It makes one self vulnerable.

When I reflect back on my life, I have been blessed to have many great loves. I have poured out my self at the feet of people who needed it, who loved it, who hated it, who resented it, who accepted it, and who gave it right back to me.

There are certain people, one is just destined to love. It isn't something that can be controlled or explained. It can't be justified or defended. It just is. It is because it simply has to be. I suppose my love for you falls immaculately into that category. I fell in love with you in about two seconds. It's strange because I believe that you were the first person I allowed that kind of love to overwhelm. It was so intense. It was so beyond what I was capable of giving. It changed me, in an instant, in to a completely different person. I was destined to love you. No matter how hard I tried to flee from it, I couldn't escape it. I could not exist, separately from you.

Today, love brought me to tears. Love compiled itself up inside my little heart and wounded me. Love hurt me. I wanted desperately, to have the safety of your love to run and hide in, but it wasn't meant to be today. I had to stand up in my wounds and communicate without you. I had to be vulnerable without you. It was agonizing. It was terrifying. It was embarrassing.

Today in RCIA, during a prayer of blessing, the catechist prayed this about me: my name, you are a beautiful and delicate soul. May you never stop seeking Christ. May you never forget how beautiful you are in my eyes.

The person who prayed that about me, doesn't know me. She doesn't know anything about me, yet she called me beautiful and delicate. Those are two words that no person on this earth has ever used, in conjunction, about me. No one, has ever, called me delicate, yet I am. As she prayed that, there I sat, silently weeping in my chair. Delicate.

To those who love much, a tremendous amount of vulnerability is exposed. To love is to risk everything. Every time. Even if it's in a platonic sense. To give of myself means to give all that I am, to defend, to preserve, to uphold. It is terrifying. It is excruciating to grasp the notion of not having it returned...

How does God handle this? How does he grasp the daily rejection? How does he keep loving with nothing in return? It devastates me. Why has he called me to give this kind of love? I am afraid. I am broken. I am too damaged. I am too selfish and prideful. I have too much sin that overwhelms me.

My darling lobster, your love perplexes me. It astounds me on a multitude of levels, simply because my mind believes it impossible to be loved. My heart believes it incapable of someone loving it. So I fear. I fear that this cosmic joke is about to be played on me and you must be destined to go away. Nothing beautiful ever lasts in my life. Everything comes with daggers. Everything results in betrayal, abandonment, destruction. I have always felt destined to suffer. My name implies such things.

I have never expected to be loved in return. I have always believed it to be impossible. But in this case, in this time of my life, I feel so desperate to experience it. I find myself disintegrating at the notion that the friends that I love, would not love me equally in return. I think my brain needs to believe that someone other than you could love me. I think I need something to hold onto just in case...

Just in case is such a sick and perverted sentence and I wish I wasn't writing it. What the hell does it mean? Like anything or anyone could ever possibly compare to you? My God it's completely impossible! It's unfathomable, but yet it terrifies me nonetheless. So much so that the slightest disagreement sends me into basket-case tears.

My love, I am so afraid. I feel so helpless and vulnerable and broken. I don't know how to believe in anything beyond you. I don't know how to trust that I'm valuable, apart from you. I don't know who I am, without you. I don't believe anyone is strong enough to handle my insanity. I don't believe anyone cares enough to.

I don't even know if I make any sense at all. Everything feels so jumbled up in my brain. I feel so lost in emotion, consumed by it. I feel so desperate.

So when she called me delicate, I crumbled, in that place, where we all had our eyes closed. I fell apart. To be seen, by a complete stranger, to be recognized, even with all my facades and my masks proudly displayed, is humbling.

I confess I ran out of there faster than a bullet out of a gun at the earliest chance possible. I'm not used to being so...exposed.