Ingrid

Fall in love with yourself first.

Yes, forgiveness will set you free. But it takes time. Yes, forgiveness is not the only way to end your misery. But it is necessary. Forgiveness is important but only true forgiveness. Lying to others and yourself about it while you’re not actually ready to forgive is more harmful than not forgiving. If you do so, you start believing that you’re over it, that it doesn’t affect you anymore. And so you’re caught unguarded by the pain and the past numerous times which only makes true forgiveness harder. Take your time. When you’re ready, forgiveness will be as easy as blinking. And when will you be ready? When it doesn’t hurt so much anymore.

But seriously, stop looking for that ‘Perfect Person’ and wait for the one who’ll make you laugh on days you want to crawl into a ball and cry, the one who holds you so tight that you forget how broken you were before and will forgive you instead of leaving after a petty argument. Just wait for someone who lets you be unapologetically yourself and kisses you with so much passion that you don’t ever have to second guess their love for you. And when you find someone like that, someone who treats you well and takes care of you on your good and bad days and tells you little things about themselves they don’t tell anyone else then hold onto them really tight and never let go.

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the deepest core of the other person—without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other.

But it didn’t break me. Nothing can break me unless I let it.

“Does it still hurt?“ she asks. “Yeah a lot,” I admit. “But it’s getting better. It doesn’t feel hopeless anymore.”

…Just because people aren’t in our lives anymore, doesn’t mean they stop thinking about us and vice versa.