I think finding love is so much less about learning how to love another human than it is about learning how to be at peace with your own thoughts. I don’t mean learning to love yourself by this. I think the term learning to love yourself is misleading. It’s touted as the only way to let someone else in your life. You have to be “healed” and “whole” first, before you can allow someone to get close. It’s certainly important to learn how to love yourself, but loving another is an entirely different skill set. It requires a whole different toolbox of which one small part is learning to love yourself. Instead one must come to terms with the things that get in the way of them being fully and totally immersed in a loving mindset. The hitches and glitches that get in the way of allowing yourself to be present in love and not judge or evaluate it. You will absolutely have terrible thoughts, you will be weak and broken, you will stray in so many ways. But you can only learn to work through these things with someone else if you are actually WITH someone else.
Keshia Hannam and Star
It is far easier to pin these guilts and flaws on the external. Allow some phantom flaw in the the other person to be the scapegoat. It’s because they don’t like your taste in music. Or they don’t have the right opinion about world affairs so it would never work. Or they could never truly understand you because they come from Jersey. These are excuses to assuage your guilt and conflict and distress. The power comes in speaking these things. It’s so easy for the dark space in your head to magnify these thoughts to real world proportions. The echoes of fear growing louder and louder until they burst into the real world as manifested true issues. You have the powerful ability to make these things real and let them affect the real course of the world you live in. You could end relationships, marriages, friendships because you let them circle too long and they gain escape velocity. But oh the power of conversation, of confession, of bleeding the dark fears into the real world. This is the hard part that we only slowly grow into if we are lucky. All of these ideas start as small dismissible thoughts and so we don’t put them into the world for fear of being judged or thought crazy. But if we ignore them too long they solidify into true objects of destruction. Instead you can set up a pattern of freeing these fears into the light and allowing yourself to see them for what they are, flimsy. More often than not your fears are shadows of opinions or long held convictions that aren’t actually true at all. Allowing them to be shared with others you trust allow them to be reflected back and seen honestly. You can see if any part of it is actually reflected in the real world or instead just manifestations of internal struggles. You can get down to the real work of dealing with the love in front of you and how you can help it flourish in the deepest and most correct way. Maybe that even includes letting it go, but only in love can you reach an honest assessment of that, not fear.