It’s Okay To Love Broken People

 Paolo Cipriani
Paolo Cipriani

We are humans. We come from broken places.

We come from hurting houses, from aching hearts, from addictions, abuse, fears, lost faith, and loneliness. We come from angry places and scared places, from families that are severed and trust that is shattered. But in all this pain, we still love.

That’s the beauty of who we are—our humanity, our existence. Despite of all we have fought through, despite all the ways we have been broken, we still find ourselves connecting to one another. We still love.

We build relationships with others like us, who have been hurt similarly and our weaving their way through pain. And we form bonds with those unlike us. Because we understand, on some level, that they are struggling in different ways. That they are broken people, too. That we all are broken, and that’s strangely beautiful.

Sometimes we want to fix. Sometimes we just want to stand alongside, as a reminder that no one is ever alone. Sometimes we put ourselves in situations we shouldn’t. Sometimes we play savior.

Sometimes we hurt ourselves in the process of rescuing someone from their own fire. Sometimes we keep the company of people we know we shouldn’t, but we love them just the same.

But despite what the world may think, it’s okay to surround yourself with what may be seen as ‘bad company’. Because we are not always the company we keep.

We each have our closet of demons, our drawer of secrets, our buried regrets. And because of this, we find ourselves loving people who might not be the best for us. We find ourselves entangled with lives of those dissimilar, struggling with vices that may pull us down with them.

But this what we need to remember: We don’t have to get lost in our love; we can always stand firm in ourselves. We don’t have to be the company we keep. We aren’t.

We don’t have to be the addictions, the rowdiness, the anger. We don’t have to be the inappropriateness or the indecency. We can keep our strength, our faith, our focus.

But we can still love.

Because at the end of the day, no matter the ways these people are different, the ways they could potentially hurt us, or the ways they may alter the world’s view of us, we are all the same.

We all come from broken places. We all need each other. Thought Catalog Logo Mark

Marisa is a writer, poet, & editor. She is the author of Somewhere On A Highway, a poetry collection on self-discovery, growth, love, loss and the challenges of becoming.

Keep up with Marisa on Instagram, Twitter, Amazon and marisadonnelly.com

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