It Will Never Be Easy To Love Me

There are 7 billion people in this world, and at some point in our lives we all want the same thing; to fall in love. Luckily, a lot of people have achieved that goal. Whether they’re happily married, divorced, widowed, or just heart broken, so many people have experienced this crazy thing we call love. In fact, even if you’ve never fallen in love with another person, so many people have fallen in love with beautiful things this world has produced; a place, a painting, a song, a piece of literature.

Although falling in love with these things is different than falling in love with a person, it’s unfortunately the closest some people are going to get to the sensation of love. I can sit here and write about my first (and so far only) love as if it was some great love story that I experienced, because it was great in its own way, but I fall into the heart broken category, and at times my view on love is a little bitter. But something I know that will always be true when it comes to me falling in love, is that whoever has the unfortunate fate to be my person, better be extremely damn understanding because I come with a lot of burdening mental baggage that will always follow me around like it’s a ghost whose one job is to haunt me forever.

When I first had my heart broken, I was told that I should learn to love myself first before I could love another person again. And I completely agreed with this advice; I still do. But what a lot of people don’t understand is that for people like me, and many others, it’s not so easy to “fall in love with yourself.” As someone who has mental health issues, I can’t even begin to describe what its like even to just get out of bed in the morning some days; let alone learn to be happy with yourself and love yourself on your own. I bask in loneliness, but I absolutely hate feeling lonely.

When I fall in love again, I want to be immersed in someone completely. I want to be understood unreservedly. I long for love and I long for someone to be my everything so maybe the crippling pain and demons inside my head will subside because I’ll have someone to scare them away. But for the sake of my future lover, I wish I didn’t have to be selfish and share this part of myself with them. I don’t want them to feel my pain; but at the same time I’ll need them more than anything on those dark days. Even thinking about it now, I can’t even fathom how someone will be able to have the patience to try and understand my messed up mind when I know they’ll never be able to and when I can’t even understand it myself.

I always have that fear (I debated putting the world irrational in front of fear) that no one will be able to stay with me because they just don’t want to deal with my mind anymore. Those days where I just want to cry for no reason, or when I wake up with paralyzing anxiety that just gets worse as the day goes on, or my awful insomnia that keeps me up late and keeps me from sleeping more than a few hours, or the nightmares I have almost every night; will someone truly be able to love me through all of that? Because lets be honest, this isn’t a totally irrational fear. It is quite possible that someone will not have the patience. And one day even if they’re so happy, my internal sadness will slowly drag them down and before I know it they can’t take it anymore. And they leave.

Eventually, anyone I become close with will realize that it will never be easy to love me. But love isn’t easy in the first place. Love is complicated, and frustrating, and sickening, and exhilarating. So I cling to the hope that maybe, just maybe, I’ll find someone that will love me because of who I am (cliché as it sounds) and think that I am absolutely worth it.

I need someone who will want to take the time to understand me; to know when I need them to comfort me, or when I need to be left alone, or to recognize when I’m breaking on the inside and can’t even understand what’s going on in my own head. That hope, that one day I’ll have someone like that, is what gets me through when nothing seems to be worth it anymore. Love is messy all on its own, and the fact that it will never be easy to love me terrifies me beyond all belief, because it is the one thing I desire more than anything in this life.