To Understand Love You Should Know What It Is And Isn’t
By Kyle Olivar
I remember how it hurt. I remember how it hurt every. Single. Time. No matter how many times I have gone through it, it has not made it hurt any less.
I remember how hard I’d try to fight back the tears and I remember how that would hurt my throat. It felt like a fist was pushing my emotions down my esophagus. I remember how my legs would start to hurt from keeping myself from falling and from trying my hardest not to quiver. Even each heart beat would hurt because it would by then be beating too hard and too loudly.
I remember that in those moments, I’d understand why a heartbreak was called a heartbreak… because you literally feel your heart break at the loss. Like a piece of you was violently pulled out and you suddenly feel the void. Your chest feels hollow and empty and, incomplete.
But I remember that I was always the one who did it… I was always the one to call a relationship off. I was always the one to acknowledge that we, or I, were holding on to skinny love. I always had to do it because none of them had the balls to do it.
Often times, I was left hanging. I was left to answer all of the questions by myself. I was left to question whether I was enough or if the “wrong” was actually, me. I was left hanging long enough to question everything I thought about myself. “What did I do? What didn’t I do? What did I overdue? Or underdo?” I would then start to lose self-worth, my self-esteem too would be thrown out the window, and for a while I would be miserable and depressed and all sorts of blue.
But after all of that, seemingly ironic, it would also be love that would liberate me. I would realize that a broken heart could only be mended by the purest kind of love; the love that I should have always had for myself.
From all of that I learned that had I not lost myself in the process of loving another, maybe, the pain would have been a bit more bearable. Had I valued myself enough, I would have learned early on that a guy who wants me, would let it show. Had I loved myself enough, I would have known that loving another also means loving one’s self. Had I cared for myself enough, I would have known better than to let a relationship drag on for weeks even when it obviously wasn’t working out anymore.
There’s this quote from an unknown author which really hit me, it said “I gave you all the love I could have used to love myself.” It strengthened my feelings as regards loving one’s self first before really loving anyone else. To understand love, one should know what it is and what it isn’t. To understand love is to know how it should make you feel: secure, content and happy – and what you shouldn’t feel: jealous, paranoid and scared. To love another is to know that to love another is to love yourself because you’d want to be able to love him the way you love yourself; captivating and liberating.