Bianca Sparacino

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.

This is me accepting that sometimes beautiful things end. This is me coming to terms with the fact that sometimes leaving is an act of love, too. That sometimes you have to walk away from something soft and hauntingly real, that sometimes hearts don’t align.

I am slowly learning how to be alone. I am slowly learning how to wake up in the middle of the bed. How to make just one cup of coffee in the mornings. How to hold my own heart, how to take up my own space.

There are corner coffee shops with mugs in every shade of feeling where you will read the paper and pretend that you’re in Paris or Spain and sip too strong coffee as you learn to be alone.

Love should not break you. My god, if there is anything you should know about love, it is that is should never destroy you, it should never tear you to pieces only to leave you alone. It should not make you ache, it should not bruise your soul. Love should never bear its teeth when things get tough, it should not use your vulnerabilities against you when it feels threatened, or hurt.

We convince the outside world that we are fine, even if we are aching for help, and that is why we don’t get it. That is why the distance between us and everyone around us widens. We are all running away from each other, when we should be running towards one another.

See, people who love deeply always lock the hurricane that is their soul into the wrong ribcages. They spill out into the bones of people who were only ever hoping to be a temporary home for their warmth.

If you care about someone, if you truly care, just be good to them. Too many people selfishly take hearts into their own hands and they fail to protect them, they fail to nurture them. Too many people grow comfortable and complacent, they lose sight of what they have.

See, I am not ashamed that I have a type. I have loved and I have lost enough to know that I deserve more than what I have settled for. I have grown, have pulled knowledge out of my brokenness, have truly taken a look at what I want, and what I need, and I refuse to accept anything less than that.

It is difficult to move on. It breaks you down in ways you never expected to be broken before. But when this happens, do not fear the rebuilding. Do not lament the pieces of yourself that you have lost, the pieces of yourself that were left over.

It is the worry that comes with knowing that we live in a generation that is oversaturated with options, that people can leave for the next best thing when something shinier and newer comes along. You see it happen all the time.

2017 is the year to prove to the world that you have every reason to be in it — that you are allowed to take up space. It is the year you finally accept that you are the only person who defines your value in life, that you are the only person who defines your worth.