Bianca Sparacino

Please don’t feel silly with yourself for caring. Almost relationships can hurt just as much as real relationships because connection isn’t measured in time. When your heart connects with someone, it connects with someone. Sometimes, that depth is fostered over years. And sometimes you crash into another human being, and despite only knowing them for a short collection of moments, you know that they are going to mean something to you. There are no rules.

Forgive yourself for what you had to do in order to kill your sadness. Forgive yourself for how you settled, or allowed yourself to be treated. Forgive yourself for the ways in which you didn’t fight for who you were becoming. Forgive yourself for the ways you tried to catch your footing.

Maybe right now your journey isn’t about love. Maybe right now your journey is about you. Maybe this is the season you are being challenged to be your own savior, to be your own safe place.

Relationships in your life should not make you feel like you are hard to love. You deserve to feel understood. Your heart deserves to feel understood. You should not feel like you have to apologize for who you are. You are human and you’re trying your best. So is your partner. But at the end of the day, you should never have to feel ashamed of your anxiety, or the way you feel things very deeply. The right person will work to understand you, and work to understand that. Because you deserve the kind of love that does the work to understand how you need to be loved.

Sometimes, we mistake a teacher for a soulmate. But the most difficult feelings we experience with them, change us for the better.

You will not find a love that is perfect, but you will find a love that reminds you that goodness exists. This love, it will inject honey into the soul of you, it will feel like warmth has cracked within your bones. And you will see how it learns you, and fights for you, and stays to weather the storms by your side. You will be reminded that there is connection in a world that often chooses distance over depth.

We live in a generation that romanticizes hustle, and moving forward as quickly as possible when it comes to careers and our success within them. But there is no point in rushing quickly towards a life that will not inspire you or fulfill you.

At the end of the day, someone with anxiety overloves. They know what it is like to feel isolated, and so they want to give everything to another human being in order to ensure that they would never feel the same. Someone with anxiety has a mind that works to convince them lies surrounding their worth and their value. Therefore, being the person who holds their hand, who stands by their side while they fight to navigate their illness, who knows how to love them on the hard days — that reminds them that they deserve to be loved the way they love others. That reminds them that there are those out there who want to care for them correctly; that there are those who want to stay.

Moving on is difficult. When you care deeply, when you are the kind of person who gives everything you have to those you love, it can be extremely hard to lay all of that love down. Breakups make you question yourself, they make you question your reality. Nostalgia can be a powerful thing, memory can be hard to part with, and it will never be easy to fully say goodbye to those who made us feel deeply and connected and hopeful. Especially when you’re empathetic, especially when you’re a hopeless romantic. 

You deserve someone who genuinely sees in you what you see in them. You deserve someone who stays, who shows up, who isn’t wishy-washy with their feelings. You deserve someone who knows what they want. You deserve someone who is honest and genuine and who comes as they are. You deserve someone who never exhausts your heart in a bad way. You deserve someone who loves you the way you love them, who fights for you the way you fight for them.

I hope you have the courage to keep loving deeply in a world that sometimes fails to do so.

And you will grieve the past. You will grieve the small and nameless moments you took for granted, the quiet nature of a love you assumed you would always get to lean on. You will grieve the concept of time, of the way you let it slip away from you, of the way in which it moves so quickly once you connect with how special it is. You will grieve every day you did not spend diving into the heart of them, all of the ways in which you were too busy, or too cool, or too consumed to notice that lived for you.

Because when you are unapologetically yourself, when you stand up for who you are, what you want to create in this world, who you want to surround yourself with, the world opens up in a beautiful way.

Maybe right now, your journey is about being alone. Maybe this is the season you are being challenged — to learn how to wake up in the middle of the bed, to finally find hope in the vacancy, hope in the quiet, hope in the way you stretch into your life and give yourself permission to take up space within it. Maybe right now, you are being shown — that you can take care of yourself, that you can depend on the person you have become, that you can be your own home no matter what comes your way.

To be human is to understand that happiness isn’t a constant. But to be human is to understand that neither is sorrow, or grief, or heartache. To be human is to feel it all, to welcome the lessons that come with the dark days, to welcome the softness that comes from the lightness of what saves you. To be human is to try, with every inch of your patchwork soul, to be proud of who you are. To care. To heal. To be your own home, even on the days you don’t like yourself.

Take care of yourself. Be kinder to yourself. Make room for yourself every single day. Make time for yourself in your routine, be less passive in the ways you connect with your own soul. Just be gentle with yourself. Learn about yourself, and invest in the things that ignite you and make you feel good — because beauty is both mental and physical, it is something you have to work at each day.

I need you to know that you are the product of what is both hopeful and haunted within you, and it is okay to exist in this world as someone who is simply figuring out how to balance that.

Because at the end of the day, if someone does not meet you where you are, you cannot keep asking them to do so. If someone cannot reciprocate your love, if someone cannot give you what you truly deserve, you have to understand that aching for them to do so before they are ready is a form of self destruction.