The Hardest Thing To Do Is Love While You’re Afraid.

Love anyway. And then love some more. Love until you think you can’t love anymore.

It seems that for any of us loving while we are afraid is literally the hardest thing in the world to do. The conscious all awakened side says that this of course is the purpose of life to love against all odds…but the other side says most of us deserve a gold medal for loving like we do despite all that we’re been through.

But that’s the thing too, unless we’ve literally been living under a rock for the past decade or so we’ve all been through a lot and we can’t categorize our pain because one of us has been divorced, or one had a bad breakup or someone else was left at the altar; the point is heartbreak is heartbreak.

And I’m sorry but there is nothing out there that is going to fuck us up like heartbreak.

The thing that sucks to know quite honestly is we’re supposed to have our hearts broken; we’re supposed to have relationships fail; we’re supposed to have to end things with people that we still love and we’re going to have those moments where we really wonder if it’s worth it to try again.

But, no matter how many times we swear off of the good stuff, eventually we find ourselves looking into the eyes of someone whose own soul pulls on our own and we begin to think maybe love really can be everything that it is cracked up to be.

And then comes the really hard part-loving even though we’re afraid.

I think that we may all be afraid of different things, some may be afraid of being hurt again, of making a mistake, of having to open up, of what other people might think, of how it could work…and honestly we could probably just go on and on.

But the truth is there are always a million reasons not to love, but none of that matters to the one reason why we should which is what if it works out?

What if this time really is different, what if every single relationship that came before was purposely placed there by God as stepping stone to this person that you are looking in the eyes of and wondering if you should grasp their hand and hang on for dear life as you once again let yourself believe in love.

But to do that isn’t just a onetime choice but a million decisions every single day, perhaps in the beginning but maybe the truth is they are choices that we will have to make until we actually see that this time is different. Sometimes it seems that we all want instant gratification and to know that we have our hands on a sure thing but in truth while we may be able to say why this time feels different, it’s going to take time for any of us to actually see and internalize those truths.

So in the meantime it’s making the choice to love even though we’re afraid.

We won’t be able to chase the fear away or completely talk ourselves out of it but we also have to know that in many ways that feeling itself tells us that this person already means a great deal to us; this fear lets us know that just maybe our hearts have already fallen, and perhaps knows that this time is different.

To love while we’re afraid is to make the commitment to stay in the moment and be real about our feelings. This means that we’re going to have to do the unthinkable and say all of our really scary thoughts to our new lover; not just scary, but the thoughts that we don’t even like to admit to ourselves. Because the only way that we are going to be able to stay present enough to overcome this fear is if we also make ourselves transparent so that the other person can help hold us accountable.

This means that if we start to drift away our new lover will be able to call us on our behavior and challenge the old ways in which we self-protected ourselves from feelings growing too deep or getting our heart broken. If we start lashing out and starting fights, they will ask if we are trying to push them away so that even if heartbroken we will ultimately protect ourselves from having to try again.

But to be vulnerable is to know that we are handing the other person to keys to all of our hiding places.

To love while we’re afraid of getting hurt again or having things not work out is quite possibly the bravest thing we can do. We feel fear not to have us move away from what scares us but rather for us to draw it closer to us so that we might learn what rests on the other side of fear, which is often everything we’ve ever wanted but had been too afraid to think we’d actually ever receive.

I know firsthand just what it takes to love with a heart that has been broken and love in a way in which there are no guarantees and sometimes it’s a process that leaves our knees weak and our stomachs tumbling into chaotic knots. There have been times that I wanted to run away, to say just forget it, but ultimately I know that those behaviors not only don’t align with the woman I am in the process of becoming but they also wouldn’t truly help me in building the kind of partnership that I hope to be a part of.

Instead I have to do everything that scares me.

I have to be honest, open, transparent, trusting and so full of love that there is no room for fear but if it does sneak in under the nighttime rumblings of dreams at 2am then I have to be strong enough to decide to believe in my fears or not.

And maybe it sounds overly simple, but at the end of the day we all have two choices; to believe in our fears or to believe in our love, but only one of those choices will require us to grow past, well…our past.

Because just maybe we feel fear to show us that if we let it, love truly can conquer all.