It’s hard to love.

I’m a passionate type of girl. I’m artsy, I write, I read, I paint, etc. I think it’s beautiful to love and fall out of love and hit rock bottom and rise above the pain. I find the ups and downs to be quite passionate and I’m not scared of a fight or two. I fall in an out of love with religion and my friendships and my family on a somewhat constant basis. For me at least, it’s super hard to love.

I truly believe that we equate love to physical attributes. When do you feel most in love with your loved one? Do you feel in love when they come home to tell you they lost their job? Do you feel in love when you have to make $50 last for the next two weeks, with two kids, and you have to travel for work? Do you fall in love all over again when your spouse falls to their knees to tell you they have been unfaithful? Do you feel butterflies in your stomach when you find out that they have to go away for a while because the weight of the world has finally crushed them? We tend to run when real life happens. Perhaps we don’t love something anymore because we don’t understand it.

When our loved one comes home to tell you that they just received a $5,000 signing bonus, you get all dressed up and celebrate. Christmas time comes and your company invites you to a fancy party and you show up dressed up like a million bucks and paste fake smiles on your face because drinks are flowing and nice dinners are served and we have to keep up with some image. We mask it all to become something we are not because love seems to be equated to laughing out loud and hugging the hardest and showing constant displays of affection. But what if love is more silent than that?

I have been a self proclaimed writer ever since I was younger. My AP English class in high school was a bore because I wanted to read Jane Austen and D.H. Lawrence novels with my eyes wide open and just get lost in the pages. I didn’t really care to dissect them so much or take away from the initial emotions I felt reading the book. I wanted to take away my own thoughts from the pages and I didn’t really want to peel away the layers. Perhaps that’s where it all began for me. I grew up thinking that the initial feeling I had about something was good enough and I didn’t want to see past that. Perhaps my English teacher knew a thing or two. Maybe he wanted us to dig deep to understand the meaning so that we truly loved and appreciated it for what it was intended to be. Not just for surface level reading or what we thought was so dreamy in our romantic little minds. I think it’s deeper than that.

Religion seems to be a common theme in my blogs. I fall in and out of love with it. It’s not so much a steady stream in my life. I think sometimes I fall out of love with it because I don’t understand it. I want to wake up in the morning and feel healed. I want everyone to not be hungry. I want cancer to go to hell. I want mean people to change their ways. I want the poor to feel rich. I don’t understand why there is so much pain in this world. Or even in my world. I’m quickly learning that religion and faith isn’t built upon layers of hard to crack codes and foreign languages. It’s a perfect love and I need to accept it as such. You don’t have to believe in God, and that’s fine. I embrace all religions and faiths and I believe that one is certainly not better than the other. You can believe in the moon and the stars, but you can’t claim to believe in nothing at all. We’re all dreamers.

Since I’m being honest here, I’ll keep with the theme. I think I wasn’t so much of a wife and I’m probably a not so great girlfriend and I stumble constantly upon being a decent parent. Not looking for sympathy, I’m just hoping to be relatable. I yell too much. I throw my hands up in the air and I slam my door. I am the last to apologize. I give up far too easily. I push and I push and I push until that person doesn’t want to pull anymore. I’m constantly looking for the ups and downs because I want to feel some fire and some movement. I’m dreamy. My heads are in the clouds and I oftentimes get lost in them. It’s hard to love me.

I think in this constant journey in the pursuit of me, I’m finding that I get lost in the right here and now. I think there is so much beauty and love in the not leaving. The yesterday and the time before. The accepting of the wrongs and the failures and the hurts and everything in between. It’s hard to love but I think it’s even harder to not. I think the layers are necessary to pay attention to. It’s sort of what we are built upon.