Please Do Not Change Who You Are

Please do not change who you are.

Please do not look at these men — these lovers who take in what they can when it benefits them and walk away when it stops — and decide that it means you are unlovable. Please do not mistake that fire in your heart for a burning in a building, something that needs to set off the alarms and the sprinkler systems and be put out. Please do not think for a second that a careless heart is somehow an indictment on you.

Please do not change who you are.

You are the poetry that reveals the beauty in the tragedy. You are the enthusiasm in the most mundane. You bring a passion to the everyday and God help anyone who mistakes that for insanity. You are all that you are, good and bad, up and down, negative and positive. You are human, capable of the whole scope of experiences and tastes and explanations. Do not feel that you have to subdue all that you are because of the hurricane that resides with the rest of your weather.

Be that hurricane! Let them choose the easier girls. They are after the McDonalds, easy and convenient and unsatisfying. They’ll learn. They will learn even the easy girls have nuance. They will learn that the easy girls are not even girls in the first place, but women. Women with a juvenile label and a crafted demeanor they hope comes off as low maintenance. They’ll learn even the easy ones are difficult, with their wants and desires and opinions, and they’ll move on once again.

Because there is no easy in love. There is no easy in being human.

It is not love to go after the girl who simply giggles at jokes and admires silently and acquiesces instantly – all in the name of said low maintenance. It is not love to sidle up to the equivalent of a live studio audience, laughing and applauding on cue and staying silent otherwise. It is not love to be with someone who never shows the side of themselves that is not always the calm serene spring. It is selfish and careless companionship and it is destined to be doomed.

Embrace your storm! You will find nothing to gain by berating yourself. There is no prize, no metal, no achievement in telling yourself that it is wrong to be sad, or angry, or envious, or insecure. There is nothing awaiting you if you decide to drop your pursuits and desires in the name of “cute”. You are all of that, the same way every one us of is all of that. If a lover steps away, embrace that it just wasn’t meant to be.

Embrace that new storm and move on.

Be open to love, to communication, to another’s feelings and emotions. The rest are details to be mirrored and complemented when the right one comes along.

And he will come along. Let his storm feed your storm, not in a way that enhances destruction, but in a way that brings out both’s natural power.

You are exactly what someone is looking for, somewhere.

So please, do not change who you are.