It’s Time To Let Yourself Be Loved

I can tell you’re hurting. You close your eyes and relive all the painful memories from your past before you fall asleep. You wake up with negative thoughts roaming purposelessly in your head. You listen to songs on the radio and associate pain with every lyric. You stare at old pictures with emptiness thick and tangible in your chest.

All the heaviness of your past is weighing down on you. You can’t quite shake the nervousness in your stomach, sinking slowly like an anchor. You haven’t quite learned how to forgive others, to forgive yourself. You so desperately want to let go, to move on, to separate yourself from what was to embrace what is, but you’re stuck.

You’re not allowing yourself to move from the space you’re in. You’re not giving someone the chance to comfort you, touch the places where you are hurting. You’re not letting yourself be loved—by you, by anyone. You’re resisting anything that looks remotely like healing—and why?

Why are you so convinced this painful place is where you’re meant to be? Why are you so scared to break and rebuild, to truly feel again? Why have you told yourself that you’re unworthy of starting over, starting new?

I know you feel tired, mentally and physically. I know the mistakes, the brokenness, the heartache from your past is eating away at you, and no matter what you do, you can’t forget. And maybe you don’t want to. As strange as it seems, maybe you’ve carried this baggage for so long, you’ve forgotten how it feels to be without it, forgot how free and light you could be.

But you don’t have to cling to what is only pulling you down.

I know you’re scared. Scared of what was. Scared of what could go wrong. Scared of what may happen next. I know you’re struggling to walk away, your body so tightly twisted around the past and the pain. I know you feel suffocated, as if you’re drowning in all that you can’t fix, can’t redo, can’t erase from your memory.

But this is no way to live, not anymore.

I know it hurts, but it’s time to let yourself be loved. Stop holding onto what isn’t growing you—people, relationships, memories, what has been lost. Stop telling yourself you’re supposed to feel like this, broken and tired. Stop wishing for things that have happened. Stop closing yourself off from the world because of one bad experience, one bad person, one bad sliver of time that is long gone now.

Stop keeping people at arm’s length, and forgiveness far from your heart. Stop thinking you don’t deserve to be light and happy and weightless again. Because you do, sweet thing. You do.

It’s time to let yourself heal.

It’s time to stop remembering how you were hurt, and start focusing on how you can get better. It’s time to stop wishing for a past relationship, and searching for a new one. It’s time to stop beating yourself up over what you can’t change, and looking to what you can.

It’s time to stop believing this is a good as it gets, because it will get better.

Let yourself be loved, most importantly by your own heart, and secondly, by the people around you.

Open yourself to relationships, to laughter, to emotion once again. Embrace possibility, embrace people, embrace the potential blessings that could happen when you stop pushing everyone around you away.

Start believing in connections again, real ones that aren’t looking to break you, but to build you. Start feeding yourself positive energy so that you can forgive and love yourself again.

Let yourself be loved. And opened. And given a chance to face this world again, only this time stronger. This time wiser. This time happier, because that is how you have chosen to be from now on.

Life will hand you obstacles. Life will give you relationships that are impermanent and people who will fail you. Life will give you memories that bring tears to your eyes and emotions that question everything you’ve ever believed in.

But don’t let the negativity keep you from feeling love.

You were meant to love and be loved.
So let yourself.

Marisa Donnelly is a poet and author of the book, Somewhere on a Highway, available here.