To The Girl Who’s Afraid To Love Again

You’re allowed to be cautious. But don’t overdo it.

By

Brittani Lepley
Brittani Lepley

Pain is inevitable, a heartbreak being the worst kind of pain there is. With every heart break, it does feel like we’ve lost a part of ourselves. Sooner or later, after we’ve used up our free heart break quota, we wake up one day to realize that we no longer recognize the person we’ve become. We reach a stage in life where we build a wall around ourselves. A wall too strong to break; too high to climb. It seems safer to be within those walls, to feel nothing at all.

What once used to be what you craved, now seems to be what you absolutely detest. You were once a girl surrounded by the people who adored you, and now, the slightest sign of love seems to irk you. You begin to slowly associate love with pain, and all you wish to do is run away from it, as far as you can.

Believe me, the initial phase is blissful. You manage to convince yourself that you are protecting yourself from feeling any pain. The walls you put up, the constant need of establishing boundaries, your unquenchable thirst to be alone, just by yourself, yup, it all seems like you’ve finally cracked the code to living a happy life. When you give pain no room, you will never lose complete control of your life, you argue with yourself.

What you don’t realize is that tiny bit of emptiness seeping into your life. You forget that we were born to feel something. Anything. Every tiny feeling. Funny thing about our emotions – You cut off one; you won’t be able to feel any of the others. You try cutting off pain, and happiness will evade you too. They’re all interlinked.

The bubble you create by doing all you can to evade pain, refuses to be filled with any other emotion. That very bubble grows bigger over time and it envelopes you completely. We call that phase, the depression phase.

Before you know it, you’re stuck all alone, trying to figure WHY you can’t seem to get your life back into control. I mean, come on, it’s been months since he left, and you’re still stuck in the same place as you were when you had your heart broken! Ridiculous!

Putting up walls may seem like an easy solution, but it’s gonna get you deeper into the mess. Learn to let it all go. Heal.

Learn to forgive yourself. Don’t be too harsh on yourself. Yeah, you misjudged someone, but it’s okay. It happens. It’s part of life. Now you’re one step ahead in trying to figure the next person out.

Associate pain with the person. Not with love. It’s just like how you’d associate sourness with lemons, not the entire fruit fraternity.

Allow yourself to be loved, not just by you, but also by the people who deserve to have you in their life.

You’re allowed to be cautious. But don’t overdo it. It becomes repulsive.

I know you’re afraid to fall in love right now, but believe me, when you finally meet the one for you, he’s not gonna break your heart. All of your previous heart breaks begin to make sense, because each and every one of it has slowly, very carefully, lead you to him.

It may just seem impossible to pull yourself together right now. It may seem to be too much of work trying to find your lost faith. But you have to.

Because getting over all of your heart breaks, all the pain you went through, those sleepless nights crying into your pillow, the constant frustration you carried around for months, learning all the lessons each heart break taught you, making the effort to believe in love, in yourself once again, will be worth it in the end. Thought Catalog Logo Mark