True Love And Its Imperfections

Heartbreak and I have shared the same couch many times. I have been on the receiving end and I am sure that I have delivered the bad news on many occasions. When things spiral out of control, or sometimes, when you see them fall apart even before it actually happens, the reality begins to sends cracks of pain down into your heart. Like the frost crystalizing across a window, your love and emotion begin to have the sharp jagged edges of ice creep and crawl their way into them.

If you aren’t careful, the frost can turn into something much worse. The shaking hands you have of receiving horrible news while looking at the screen on your phone can turn into ones clenched. Many will not strike anything, but those clenched fists send this horrible energy right into your chest. Your once overwhelming moments of joy turn into anger, pain, and at its worst…hate.

You let that into your life. You allowed that moment to destroy you. And it will, I promise you. For as long as it takes, you will battle the feelings and memories of love you have with the current feelings of pain, regret, and the looming weight of hate. Jung said, “The brighter the light the darker the shadow.” I would have to agree. I have found that as I try to break out of my shell more and more as time goes on, I also find that the moments of darkness get blacker. The opposites polarize even more.

On one end you may see this as a really bad thing. Why in the world would being susceptible to a deeper shade of black be a good thing? This darkness, while uncomfortable, has given me the ability to appreciate the moments of light. This darkness, has given me the ability to not only understand myself at my worst, and know that I can make a choice to stay in it or get out of it, but it has also given me the opportunities to empathetically feel other people’s pain. To be able to look them in the eyes and without them even saying anything…I can already understand what they are going through. This, is something I was never able to do. I was never able to connect with people on that level because I was afraid of the dark. I was afraid of the pain.

These things, these emotions, these uncomfortable thoughts are nothing to be feared. If you leave yourself open to the true possibilities of life everything is going to be presented to you. Great angst follows the suit of great celebration as does the moon following the sun. You must realize though that we are never left without light. There is light in every single situation. The shaking hands that I talked about earlier – there was light in that. There was freedom from something. Wings were given. But at the time, I sure didn’t see it like that. In time though, it all came around.

Love is giving someone the power to destroy you…but trusting them not to. That trust is the most important thing in the world. But I want to talk about something that many quotes or sayings don’t talk about.

It’s ok. It’s okay to have your love burned to the ground.

I believe, and many might disagree with me but this is the choice I have made in my mind, that each of us do have someone on this planet whose heart will match up perfectly with ours. Many times throughout my life I have found that things were incredibly good and that there was a warmth inside that started to heat up. You can call it love, call it whatever you want to, but the reality is that the frost from the old was starting to recede. That the soul was beginning to light up and that feeling was pain leaving the body. Maybe it wasn’t the right one or as many call it your “soul mate” but you caught a glimpse of that feeling that feels so good inside.

It’s okay to get burned to the ground for many reasons. The first being that you immediately know that it wasn’t the right person for you. Funny enough, we get little twinges along the way in most of our relationships that tell us it’s not right in some way or another. True relationships take work, but you always have to trust your gut and intuition – there are many things that go on in our lives and in our minds that lead us to the right path and we just have to trust that it is indeed right for us.

Getting destroyed teaches us a lot more about ourselves that anything else. We get to see how we react to adversity. We can begin to understand how we process pain and the negative emotions that come along with it. Most of all, we get to make a choice that can be one of the most difficult decisions there is out there: play it safe and guard myself in the future from more pain or break out of this and continue giving people and the world my best – and another heartbreak may come – but I refuse to die and unlived and unloved life.

That’s the key.

Because in the end, that’s the biggest decision you can make…and it ends up translating into the rest of your life. Play it safe or give another trusting wild go at it. The power of the heart and being able to deliver passion and love into your life trumps everything else. While I do believe that the world is very balanced in its ways – what goes up must come down – I do believe that we can make the ups last longer and decide to hike out of the lows faster. I would venture to say that is the greatest lesson I have learned over the past 7 months.

When you decide to give your best, when you decide to love your heart out, when you decide to take a risk, you are not just making a decision about the people in your life, but you are making one of the greatest decisions you can when wanting to follow your true calling and dreams. That type of energy is infectious and magnetic. You will attract things into your life because you are looking for them.

You will love yourself.

Loving yourself starts with the clearing out of everything else that you are holding onto. Pain from past situations. Regrets. Anxiety. You have to get it all out. There are situations you need to resolve and there are many things you have to let go. With all of that frost in your soul, you have no shot to love yourself, love others fully, or even treat people right.

If I had to tell you one of the most influential things I have ever done in my life, it was clearing up my past. It was making the phone calls, writing the letters, and getting really uncomfortable. “You must do the thing you think you cannot do” said E. Roosevelt. For many, it’s looking into our past and resolving the conflicts, admitting our wrongs, and giving ourselves the opportunities to be freed from the mental shackles of something that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Free yourself.

Love deeply.

Build yourself back after you have been destroyed.

Live now.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project