Here’s To Those Who Love With Their Guards Down

Here’s to those who’ve been hurt before. To those who have loved too fully, lived too largely, burst through the seams of their own teeming lives one or two times too many to pretend it doesn’t scathe – but who move forward despite the pain. Here’s to those who give life their all despite the scars that they’d collected– who know that the struggle always gives way to the ecstasy and that it will always be worth it to hold out just a little bit longer.

Here’s to those who cast off their guards – who don’t aim to keep the world out when they’re hurting but who let it in further. Who see the cracks running along their broken hearts and use them as leverage to burst them wide open. Those who aren’t afraid to live out loud when they are lost and when they’re flailing and they’re broken. To those who don’t need to hide themselves away because they are not afraid to admit their imperfections. They are broken and they’re reeling but they’re here. They’re still going. They’re not checking out from the game the second they fail to be on top.

Here’s to those who don’t punish new lovers for the mistakes of lovers past. To those who dismantle their defences, burn their walls down to the ground, shed themselves of the armour they’ve put on before trying to walk alongside somebody new. Here’s to the people who slew their own dragons before new lovers had the chance to get burned. Here’s to those who took responsibility for heartache and took healing into their own hands.

Here’s to those who understand that the truest strength comes not from hiding behind your walls but from fearlessly stepping outside of them. To those who face down their demons, cast off their armour, march boldly and wholeheartedly into every battle they know they might lose. To those who know that the fight is more important than its outcome. That the risk is a reward in itself. That who you become on the battlefield is infinitely more important than whether or not you win the war.

To those who live with their guards down, come run with me. Be wild with me. Be brokenhearted with me. Let’s live fully and faithfully and expansively in the world that exists outside the walls we have knocked down. Bring your scars and your all your failures. Bring your heartache and your bliss. We’ll bask in the strange, beautiful chaos that does not reach through the walls others have built up for protection. We’ll let our wild hearts stretch and tear until they burst wide open.

Because the truth is, living with ours guards up is no life at all – it is only a way to die slowly and cowardly, long before our time has come. Because we know that if there’s a time and a place for us in this world, it must be here. It must be now. It must be with each other. And it must be beyond whatever walls we build up to keep our hearts safe – it must be somewhere as fearlessly unguarded as ourselves.