Bianca Sparacino

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.

If you have ever felt like your personality almost continuously attracts those who need guidance and help in life — you may be an empath.

And I know, I know — it is difficult when every tender part of who you are has been bruised and let down by the ones who never learned how to love you properly. But you must believe in this love the way it believes in you. You must trust it.

I need you to know that there are others like you in this world; others who are messy hearted, others who feel things intensely, and without hesitation, others who cannot contain all that they hold within the worlds of their mind because they have only ever known how to pour, how to shatter, how to give and give and give.

Instead, the eerie similarity between all of these male poetry accounts, is the fact that they use the female experience to promote themselves.

Do not hold any space in your heart for those who are not showing up to claim it. Instead, open yourself to the world, and allow for it to fill that space with the kinds of people, the kinds of moments, and the kinds of experiences that exhilarate you, that compel you — that make you love yourself.

I hope you forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made, for the past you keep alive inside of you. I hope you learn to let go — of the things you had to do in order to heal, or to grow, or to survive. You are doing your best. You are human. Please don’t ever forget that.

When you lose someone, you don’t just lose them once. You lose them every single day, you lose them slowly.