I know this is going to sound crazy, but I need to get things off my chest. There’s so many emotions and things that I’m sorting through right now but can’t express to anyone because I’m so scared I’ll hurt someone’s feelings or disappoint someone. The truth is that I feel so much. There is this constant need for love, not the type of love that some women expect: the expensive gifts, the fancy dates, and the unrealistic expectation for a man to be “manly”. I long for the kind of love that lasts forever, one that never changes even when times change, even when the age changes. I long for a love that isn’t felt with just gifts and dates. The kind of love I desire is one that requires effort, it requires sacrifice and time. It requires patience, dedication, honesty, and so much more than this. I know what you’re thinking, where the fuck do you expect to find that? And if i were you, id think that too… 

But I’ve settled for the past twenty years of my life, i turn 21 in one week from today and can wholeheartedly say that I have not once stepped out of my comfort zone to experience something that I truly want. I’m not proud of this, but I’ve put myself last for such a long time that breaking this cycle seems so bizarre, and wrong even. There is nothing wrong with putting yourself first, I know this to be true because I encourage it for anyone, obviously. A life where you put your needs first ultimately results in a life that is filled with self-gratification, an abundance in self-esteem and self-love. But what happens when you do everything for other people? It’s a lifetime of misery and unhappy endings for you, while others feel happy. People have told me I’m such a “people pleaser”, honestly i never really understood the term but i’ve grown to believe that it meant i was just a nice person. The  older I get, it becomes more evident to me that people pleasers are exactly what the two words entail. There is no “understanding” to be made. It’s what it is: people pleaser. A person that lives to please other people. 

That’s what it is. And that’s what I am. 

I need to make others happy, even if it means sacrificing what I really need in exchange. I smile every single day and sometimes I’m so good at hiding what I feel that I even begin to believe myself. But I’m lying. 

I don’t smile because I’m genuinely blissful and happy, I smile because it pleases the people in my life. I smile because it’s easier to imagine that I’m happy than to truthfully admit that I’m damaged goods.

I come from a broken family and still haven’t found my way through the brokenness. The walls of my past shaped my way of thinking and molded me into someone that me from the past wouldn’t recognize. 

I picked out the photos that they would play in a slideshow during my fathers viewing and watched my mother sign the papers, granting permission to release his corpse to another country where my relatives were preparing his burial. How can something that was so broken continue to break? The saying “you can’t break what’s already broken” is a joke. Because I was so sad and hurt that he abandoned me when I was seven, but losing him to gunshots broke me. I broke and I was so hurt by this loss. I cried at his viewing and saw his lifeless face, it was expressionless and dead. It’s one of those images that will linger in my memories forever. And no matter how many years go by, it’ll never fade away. I forgive my father for all the hurt, for his part in inflicting all of the broken parts of me. I forgave him for being absent and failing to be my father. He didn’t give me the love that I longed for, one with honesty, dedication, one that required sacrifice and effort. I never received it.

Do you understand what I’m saying? The love I want is so rare, not even my father gave me it. The love I want is one that I deserve. Or at least, I think I do.

Maybe I’ll never find it, shit maybe I won’t even get something remotely close. But thats okay, because I will make the best out of a bad situation, like I always have. I’ll continue to hope that love is still in the world, and somewhere, someday, in someplace I will find the love that I’m desperately seeking for.

The love that one day I would reciprocate, to whoever that person might be.

I’ll love that person with everything, I’ll bring the sacrifice, the effort, the dedication and the honesty.

august 8th, 2022

j