“Too good to be true.” Those words are always echoing inside you. They are the inevitable follow up to any good thought that crosses your mind. There is a catch to everything. There are hidden motives and wolves in sheep’s clothing everywhere. This can’t possibly be as good as what I hope it is. Nope, won’t fall for that one again.

Truthfully, it’s only fair that your knee jerk reaction to everything tends to curl towards pessimism. If you’ve spent years feeling like you’re living under a rain cloud, it makes you feel awfully suspicious if some sunshine starts peeking out. You’ve been taught that in general, most people aren’t as nice as they seem. In the past, kindness was always followed up with some ulterior motive. Why would anything be different this time?

For the sake of being bluntly honest, it’s because you’re wrong. Now, it’s not necessarily your fault that you’re wrong. The things you have experienced really painted a grim picture of the world around you and that’s not on you. However, at the end of the day, if you think everyone is up to some agenda, you couldn’t be farther away from the truth.

Sometimes our mind is our own worst enemy when it comes to deciding who to trust. If you’ve trusted the wrong people before and ended up severely burned, it’s only rational that you would want to keep your guard up and push anyone away before they get close enough to actually matter. If we’re being real here, this is a good skill to have in some instances because yes, there are people out there with bad intentions who we are much better off without. The problem is that we get so caught up in those bad intentions that we close the door to people who really are genuine.

Now I’m not saying to take your survival skills and all the things you’ve learned about self-preservation and put them somewhere on a shelf. These things are still useful, of course. What I am saying is that there are far more wonderful people out in the world than there are bad ones. Maybe you feel like your intuition is faulty and scarred from past betrayals, which is fair. You have to try hard to put the pain in its place so you can see people clearly for who they are. Not everyone is going to hurt you. Not everyone is going to lie to you. Not everyone is hiding behind a facade. Trust me. Your brain is just stuck in safety mode.

The first step is to convince yourself of the truth. You deserve to be treated well, and you deserve to be loved for exactly who you are. You deserve people in your life who are honest with you, people who actually care about respecting you, people who can really see you. Realize how worthy you are of all these things. When your own self-respect is at the elevated level it should be, your internal compass starts working again. Learn to trust yourself again, because that’s where your power comes from. No one can throw you for a loop again because you’re wiser now. You’ve learned your lessons, and yet here you are. Still looking for the good. Still letting those optimistic thoughts seep in, even if before now you would have squashed them soon after. Let those positive thoughts stay. Instead of always thinking, But what if things turn out badly again?, try thinking, But what if they don’t?

There are billions of people in the world. A lot of those people have been let down too. A lot of them have hearts like you do. A lot of them are thinking the same thoughts that you are right now because they too were taught cruel lessons a time or two in their lives. A lot of those people are already in your life, and they genuinely love you more than you realize.

You don’t have to keep pushing everyone away. It’s time to let yourself be treated the way you deserve by the people who love you. It’s okay to let your walls down again because I can promise you, the good ones are out there and they will show you all the good things about people that you thought didn’t exist. You deserve that love, and you deserve to feel safe in loving people back the same way.

When you look forward and leave the past behind you, you’ll realize that the world is a lot brighter. You might not have those rose-colored glasses from before, but you can still see how much good is out there. Don’t let the past make you shrink back into your shell, because honestly, one of the best things about this life is the people we get to share it with.