so afraid to love

I'm afraid to love.

So afraid to love.

 

Every time I love, that love is taken from me.

I pour my heart into something or someone, and that love dies.

I hold back tears and feel a knot forming in my throat.

I try to hold onto hope... but hope is so fleeting.

 

What is the point? Why love? Why give your heart to someone? Why dedicate yourself to making someone else's life better?

 

This is my experience: anytime I love someone, my love is trashed, stomped-on, cast out like garbage, spit on, mutilated, taken for granted, manipulated, and eventually scorched. Love is a painful thing for me. It feels so good, yet I always know--in the back of my mind--that things are going to bottom-out and I'll end up in the middle of a dried-up oasis, melting under the desert sun.

 

Do I need to be someone else? I'll change if I have to!

Is my character not good enough? My personality too unique?

I can change that. I'll change it, just to be loved.

 

The moment I finally reach the point where I will give my heart to something, it is taken from me--like some sort of cruel torture exacted on me by unseen forces. Can you blame me for having such difficulty in trusting in God? Can you blame me for being, at the very least, hesitant to trust God, when my dreams are given to me on a silver platter then snatched away just as I begin to thank Him for it?

 

Ams and I were talking the other day. Our lives are cyclical when it comes to these things. The moment life starts going our way, it gets pulled out from under us.

 

I try to hold onto hope. I try to keep an optimistic, positive outlook. But our life experiences shape who we are and how we perceive the world around us. I have apparently not been good enough before, and I feel like I will never be good enough. I'm too weird, too strange, whatever... But in the end, whatever title you want to give it, whatever classification you place it under, I am inadequate. I do not perform as desired. Perhaps I am too human--or too me. If I am too me, then I must change who I am.

 

I can take three routes. Either stay where I'm at, clinging to a hope even though it kills. Or I can move on, and seek another answer to my prayers. As Weatherly said, "When we think God has answer our prayers and it is revealed that what we thought was an answer to prayer actually was not, then we do not lose hope: we keep waiting." So I must wait. Or I can give up. I can hang up my coat, throw off my shoes, bury my face into my pillow, cry myself to sleep--and never wake up.