Read This When You’ve Been Betrayed By Someone You Loved

Your big heart, you discover, is both a blessing and a curse.

When you love, you love hard. You’ll do anything for anyone. You wear your heart prominently on your sleeve, unaware of the target it creates. You treat others with the love and respect you’d expect in return. You give them your all, forsaking warnings from all others that there are red flags you don’t see. Something is not quite right, they say. But you are blinded by the promises of forever.

You are sure you are foolproof this time. But then their true colors explode onto the canvas of your heart, and you realize they do not have the heart you do. They did not truly reciprocate the love you felt. You were not foolproof. You are not bulletproof. But the holes in your heart are indeed proof that this is not a dream.

You pray for your heart to be hard. To go cold. You think of revenge not as a dish served cold, but a potion in the cauldron of your mind, where you can dish out the poison they have put into your soul. You can make them hurt too, you think. They should hurt. Their foundation should be cracked open and they should be exposed for the fraud that they are and always were. The warnings of the others echo loudly in your ears like sirens and you know they told you so. You didn’t want to believe that it was possible for you to feel this bad again, yet here you are.

But this is not where you have to be.

In that place of bitterness, you do not have to live. In that space of darkness, you don’t have to stay. You find out the hard way, like you have found so many things to be true, but that doesn’t make you a fool. It doesn’t make you wrong. It makes you human. Your big heart is what is needed in this world, where everywhere you turn there’s hatred and violence and apathy and darkness. You are a light that cannot be extinguished, no matter how hard others may try. They want your light for themselves, but they cannot recreate or duplicate what is natural to you. You are what is right in this world, and your heart is your badge of authenticity that you are, in fact, real.

You will love hard. Your heart will break harder. But you will rise to the occasions of brokenness, because you were not made to stay stagnant in it. The pain resonates so that you can pass it on to the next human that needs to know that someone has, in fact, felt as bad as they feel and that they can be assured that they can feel better again one day. Your heart is a safe harbor to those who need its shelter. A reminder that it is okay to be soft in a world that wants to make you hard, and then make you crumble.

Yes, you’ve felt the sting of betrayal. You’ve been twisted until you were almost rung out completely of trust and yearning to love and be loved. But you have survived. You will survive. And you will show others what it is like to do so with grace, even when that grace is messy, stained with tears, and broken in anger like glass. Even when it is locked in a room where you are screaming until you can’t breathe and sits heavy on your chest like cement. That grace will withstand the hardest of blows. Let it be your shield for your heart, which will fight your hardest battles for you if you allow it to show through.

Your big heart is a gift and a curse, but it’s up to you which one that is. I implore you to make it a gift, but one that is to be earned.