5 Reasons Why You Should Delete Tinder RIGHT NOW (While there’s Still Hope for you):

1. You are not an option to be weighed:
   With a whole world of pretty faces at your fingertips, it’s temptingly difficult not to get wrapped up in the endless swiping of a finger. But, your pretty little face is 1 in a million & you are worth more than a swipe. The composite list of all that you could offer someone is worth so much more than you could summarize in a two-sentence bio that Mr. Right-Now probably isn’t even reading anyway.
2. Tinder is an app based on convenience:
   Do you really want someone to date you because it’s merely convenient for them? Because you live less than 25 miles away? Because you have blue eyes that fit their preference? Because you’re 5’6 and they wouldn’t want to have to bend down too far?
3. You’re not a “hook-up”, kind of girl:
   Let’s face it; Tinder got its bearings as an app for the lonely “hook-up” seeker. You can’t turn to Tinder looking for a worthwhile relationship & then be surprised when everyone you talk to turns out to want just what the site advertises for: a hook-up.
   Guard your heart; it’s the only one you’ve got. Don’t offer it up to the undeserving on the tip of your swiping-finger. Because if he can’t have sex with it, he’s going to return it.
4. Tinder is the support group meeting place for those with commitment issues & the emotionally unavailable:
   I’m serious. They should do a survey. It’s not going to be so “convenient” anymore when you’re elbows deep in his ex-issues, or his trust-issues, or his two-steps-forward-six-steps-back issues. You will get tired of dancing. You will get tired of fighting someone else’s battles. You will just be inconveniently tired.
5. Romance doesn’t deserve to die:
   You are worth a chance meeting in a coffee shop when you were just trying to avoid the rain. You’re worth an “I just had to introduce myself,” from the kind smile of a nervous stranger who didn’t want to miss his chance. You’re worth respecting and honoring. You’re worth not having to worry that your Tinder-date is back online the moment he drops you off because for a moment he forgot anyone but you existed in the world.

There is an endless list of all that you are worth & at the very top it says that you deserve to be reminded of them. So here’s your reminder: delete Tinder, because (spoiler alert), it’s not on the list.

Boy Behind The Wall

Boy Behind The Wall,

I think it’s the stuff of tragedies that you allow yourself to become a product of what has happened to you; When you sabotage your own happiness; When you carry all of your issues around with you, under a dark rainy cloud, in a way that makes you unapproachable to anyone who doesn’t deserve to be rained on; to anyone who may have good intentions.

It is no one’s fault, but yours and the person who hurt you, that you got hurt. Maybe it’s not even your fault that you got hurt, but its certainly not the world’s fault. It’s no one else’s responsibility to carry the baggage you were left with.
In fact, if you take the time to really be there for yourself when you’re hurting and when you’re healing, then no one has to carry the baggage at all. Not even you. That’s the thing about issues: when you pull them apart, they aren’t issues anymore. You have the ability to origami issues into lessons so they don’t become burdens. But only YOU can do that.

I think its hard for you to separate the things that have happened to you. You’re not alone in that. But when you go into a situation with a whole heart and it doesn’t work out the way you planned, you need to pick yourself up, adjust, take what you need to from the experience and leave the rest behind. If you spend the rest of your life expecting the present to apologize for the past, you’ll never see the future.

Just because one person didn’t appreciate your heart, doesn’t mean that no one else deserves the chance to see it. The world is already a bitter, ugly place most of the time & its filled with too many heartbroken, resentful people dragging their own issues along behind them. The world has plenty of darkness, can’t you spare a little of your light?
You are so much more than the series of unfortunate events you have been a part of. You are so much more than any heartbreak or pain you could ever endure.

If you’re waiting for someone to come along who is going to remind you what love is, you’re going to be waiting awhile. Because the only person who can remind you of it, is you. You are so worth loving, but you have to LET yourself be loved. You have to be ready for it. You have to LET yourself be ready for it.

I wish it could have been me.

I’ll never get to know the rasp of your voice when you’re running on too little sleep and too much love. The smell of black coffee that lingers in the air between warm kisses. The absolute possession that radiates from your body when your hand lingers at the small of my back. The pleading of “please fix me” that reads from your eyes but never falls from your lips. But someone will.

I wish it could have been me.
But sometimes people just get burned out from running into your brick wall, of climbing your fortress, of apologizing for someone else’s mistakes, of being pulled in and rushed away again just as quickly; sometimes people just get dizzy from the constant motion of 2 steps forward & 6 steps back. They just get tired of dancing.

Sincerely,
Girl Who Could Have Loved You

Something Has To Make You Feel Whole

The worst part about breakups is that they’re broken. Even when you think you’ve washed yourself clean of them, that you’ve patched yourself back up again & carried on, you find little reminders of the damage that’s been done. And then suddenly you can’t take your eyes off them. You catch glimpses of them in mirrors; you can feel them burn and ache; you can feel them light up under the touch of someone who might mean well. And it feels like everyone else is watching them too. Everyone is staring at the cracks in your exterior with curious eyes just waiting for the second you crumble. And maybe you’re waiting for it too.

Because no matter how you patch it up, broken is still broken. It’s still the breaking apart of something whole; It’s still damage.
I’d like to think that throughout our lives we become just damaged enough to fit gently against someone else. That all the breaking apart will only make sense the moment we realize how whole it makes us with them.

At least that’s what I’d like to to think all of this means. Because for my own sanity, it has to mean something. I can’t justify a life of holding my broken self together if I know that you’re never healed. Because something has to make all of the nonsense make sense.

Because now I have this fear that I’m terribly easy to let go of. And I carry it around with me everywhere. I’m blaming people before they have a chance to need blaming; I’m leaving myself before they leave me. I’m terrified that my life will always be a series of holding on and letting go and that I’ll always miss the cues for both.

Because for my own sanity, it has to mean something. I can’t justify a life of holding my broken self together if I know that you’re never healed. Because something has to make all of the nonsense make sense.
Something, in this terribly broken life has to make you feel whole.

Even when you think you’ve washed yourself clean, that you’ve patched yourself back up again & carried on, you find little reminders of the damage that’s been done.
And then suddenly you can’t take your eyes off them.
You catch glimpses of them in mirrors;
you can feel them burn and ache;
you can feel them light up under the touch of someone who might mean well.
And it feels like everyone else is watching them too.
Everyone is staring at the cracks in your exterior with curious eyes just waiting for the second you crumble.
And maybe you’re waiting for it too.

Chapter: Land Of Heartbreak

“I just don’t understand how I could care about someone so much, but not really know them at all,” he said, his head cradled in shaking hands.

I laughed at the irony of the situation; that I had been asking myself the same question about him years earlier. It’s funny when someone offers comfort in heartbreak with “the world spin on,” as if suggesting that your pain being not even a hiccup to the rest of the world would knock the wind out of you any less. But its true that the world doesn’t wait for you & while you’re busy hurting or living, it always finds a way to come full circle, until you’re standing with your face pressed against the irony.

“Welcome to the land of heartbreak,” I said “that’s pretty much our ‘hello’ to each other”.

Chapter: Our Baggage Was Too Heavy, So We Burned It Down.

 “God, I’m so damaged,” He mumbled.

“Aren’t we all?” I laughed.

“Maybe..” He said with such hopelessness, like he was saying it simply to convince himself.

“Listen, I think that’s just a part of growing up,” I offered.
“The older we get, the more time we have to collect baggage. I’d like to think that the whole point of it is to find someone who can fold your issues up and hand them back to you in a way that doesn’t make them feel immense anymore. Like finally, you’re not as damaged as you thought you were.”

He mulled my words over in his head before shaking his thoughts loose.
“But I treat them like it’s a game and that can’t be helping them not be anymore damaged than I am… like I have this sick need to drag them down to my level of fucked up.“

He looked at me like I was supposed to tell him he was wrong. That he wasn’t the hurricane I knew he had become in the years since we had lost touch. But I couldn’t. I had caught my own brief glimpse of his rainstorm in the times that he would reach out to me, in the dark, after months of silence; like I had become the only sunny day he could remember in his life. He just needed to step back into the warmth for a moment, if only to remember that it had once existed.

“I blame it on you, you know? Before you, I never had any feelings. I was never hurt before you. Now that’s all I’ve been since.” He said.

I paused, unsure of what to do with the warped compliment I wasn’t sure he was giving me. I lost myself in memories of our old life together; moments of tenderness that were split right down the middle by a hateful version of him I never remembered being introduced to until he was hurling ugly words at me through a phone line. The phone would disconnect followed by our life together only moments later. I was positive I held my tongue for as long as I could, giving myself a few more seconds to soften the words that were about to fall from the mouth of a girl who was harder than the one he had loved once.

“You left me,” I reminded him, ” and eventually you have to understand that you made that decision alone. You packed up your feelings, one box at a time, and took them with you.”
When he didn’t respond, I continued,
“I don’t mind being your voice of reason or your calm before the storm when you need it, but I’m not yours; you’re not going to find me in someone else if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“You were right to ignore me for as long as you did. You should have kept ignoring me,” he said, an immediate hardening evident in his voice.

This is what our melted friendship had become. It was a series of touch and go moments strung together sloppily and barely hanging on. It was conversations in the middle of the night, when life became too heavy to sift through alone. It was misplaced anger meant for someone else who had gotten too close; sentences punctuated with ‘leave me alone’. It was my phone lighting up in the middle of the night with messages of insecurity or questions left open-ended because we were too scared of the answers. It was vulnerability and honesty we couldn’t hand over to anyone else because they wouldn’t understand it quite the same; it wouldn’t feel the same in their hands. It was a blazing heat that burned so bright and fizzled out faster than you expected it to. Our relationship was and would continue to be holding on and letting go until one of us decided we were tired of burning the other to the ground; or more likely: until we were nothing but ashes.

2015

Maybe that’s the lesson in all of this:

that nothing is ever completely black & white.

If you look closely enough, they always bleed.

Maybe him leaving wasn’t completely good or bad.

And even though his decision seemed cut & dry,

you just have to look closely enough to see the bleeding;

to see the balance of both.

Here’s to 2015:

a year of finding balance in the chaos.

Dear Future Lover

Dear Future Lover,

I’d like to think that this will pass. That someday I’ll wake up & want to chase those butterflies you offer; the kind that love is too sparing with. I hope that I’m able to let my guard down & that I’m willing to let you more than halfway in. I want to be able to take you for what you’re worth; believe you for what you tell me to be true. But even though I try not to carry everything that weighs me down, I sometimes catch my reflection & see it all there on my back.

I know it isn’t fair to ask you to sort through the mess that he left behind. But I’m somewhere buried beneath that heap of heartbreak, I promise. The girl who is capable of letting the light in is in there, she just hasn’t seen it in so long. I hope that you’ll still reach for my hand in the darkness because I’m searching for yours, even if I don’t know it yet.

I’m going to try not to make too many promises. But the one thing I can promise, is that if you can be patient with me, you’ll never know a love like mine. I have so much to give to you, I just need to get it all back first.

I hope that we can fill up the space in each others lives in a way we have never known before; that all the brokenness in me has just been waiting for you to fill me up. I would have never known it possible to feel that whole. And when my fingers fit snugly in yours, or my head rests perfectly on your shoulder, I hope you’ll never know such a fullness.

When you tell me you love me, I hope that I won’t have to weigh it out. That you remind me every day in the way you look at me, the way you tell me that I’m beautiful & in the way you make me feel alive.
I hope that we set each other ablaze with love & we will have never seen something burn so bright.

I hope that we can be each other’s teachers. I want to learn the caverns of your soul & the peaks of your life before I stumbled into it demanding answers to the questions meant for someone else.
I’ll owe you my heart, because you taught me how to fill it up again.

You have a good soul. I know you do because you’ll remind me every step of the way that I do too.

I’m waiting for you, just as you are for me.
❤

Lessons Learned

I’ve spent the last 2 years of my life with someone, planning the REST of my life. The plan is obviously irrelevant now & I’m surprisingly a lot more ‘okay’ with that than expected. Everyone likes to remind me of this with their constant “I don’t know how you do it”‘s & their “I’m so proud of you for how you’re handling this”. To be honest though, I don’t mind the reminders.. Because I’m pretty damn proud of myself too & I don’t really know how I’m doing it either.
And while I can’t make sense of a lot in the wake of this heartbreak, there are a few things that are crystal clear:

I’ve always been someone to wear my heart on my sleeve. I’m constantly over-analyzing and re-evaluating how to pour my heart out to mostly the people who don’t deserve it. I would like to think that over the years I have fine-tuned my horrible taste in people & while I can’t vouch for that improvement just yet, I can say that what I HAVE fine-tuned is more important: how I treat myself.

I used to beat myself up. If someone decided not to love me anymore, I couldn’t remember why I should love myself either. Even though I knew that the outcome of our relationship wasn’t my fault, I blamed myself for allowing it to happen. How could such a pretty girl allow herself to get so hurt? What did I do to make them not want me anymore? At the time of these heartbreaks, I couldn’t understand that they were doing me a favor. These were the kinds of boys that left because I didn’t NEED them enough for them to WANT me anymore or because they didn’t know THEMSELVES well enough to know someone else the way they should.
I wish I could sit with the girl I was then while she cried; while she curled up with fist-fulls of heartbreak & just laid down in the sadness & remind her of her strength. I wish I could grab her shaky face between my steady hands & tell her that whatever that was, it wasn’t LOVE. That if no one else will give you the love you deserve, you better be the first one in line to give it to yourself.
How could such a strong girl allow herself to think anything less?

I’m an independent person by nature & over the years, I have harnessed it. I want to do it myself, have it all to myself, work for it all by myself, and anything else BY MYSELF. I’ve always thought of it as equal parts vice and virtue that I try my best to not need anyone & I don’t let anyone think otherwise. I think this is probably part of the reason that I tell everyone I’m not a “second chance” kind of person when it comes to those I allow close to me. I don’t want to give someone the chance to get close to me, allow them to hurt me, leave & then attempt to try it all again in hopes of a different outcome. I don’t want that person to think that I NEED them in my life; that this person-shaped hole has just been hollowed out in my life waiting for them to show back up & fill the void. I don’t need them & what I definitely don’t need is the coin-flip of a second chance. 50/50 odds of the second chance winding up JUST like the first chance is not, nor will it ever be, betable odds to me.

You might not agree with me. You might be thinking to yourself: “Sometimes people just don’t get it right the first time”. You’re right, they don’t always. Sometimes being too scarce with second chances can leave you an island in and of yourself. I completely agree..
I think however, that there comes a time in your life when you have to draw the line (in the sand of that damn island if need be) between whats best for YOU & what’s best for everyone else. I hope that line points you in the direction of what you deserve & what/who you can live without. I hope that line teaches you the difference between being alone & being lonely. There is a very long list with your name on it of all the things that you deserve and at the very top is SELF LOVE. You deserve love in every corner of your life; in friends, family, lovers. But most of all, you deserve it from yourself.

The point I’m trying to make is this: Guard your heart. It’s the only one you’ve got. Don’t be afraid to be stingy with second chances if your GUT is telling you to. Respect yourself & you will grow into the strong person you sometimes forget you can be. It’s okay to be alone & love it. It’s NOT okay to be alone & hate yourself or your life or anything else that you have the power to change by just giving yourself a little bit of love. Allow yourself to come up for air after the shipwreck of a heartbreak, or wash your hands clean of a toxic relationship, if it makes you feel a little lighter. Because god, the world is heavy enough already.

Not-So-Dreamy Daydreams

I keep having this recurring daydream where he shows up, standing in my doorway, offering me handfuls of apologies. I never actually hear the sense he tries to make of all of this nonsense he has put me through, so I can’t tell you if it holds any weight or not. Let’s be honest though: it couldn’t possibly. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.

Regardless, when he is standing there, staring at me trying to explain his way out of the darkness he has left me in, I can just see the blank expression on my face; the disconnect. Like I’m staring into that darkness & literally seeing just that: darkness. Though whatever he says is muted, I can hear myself clearly speaking back to him:

“I don’t know you.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“I don’t know anything about you.”
“I don’t know who you are.”
“I don’t know you”.

I can hear myself repeating the same things over and over again as if I’m speaking to a stranger, but I never shut the door.
I can see myself, blank-faced, mouthing different versions of the same sentences.

& then suddenly I don’t know if it’s him I’m saying those things to,
or myself.

Close The Door.

In a countless Pinterest venture, I kept stumbling across this quote by C. Joybell that reads: “You will find that it is necessary to let things go, simply for the reason that they are heavy.” Every time I pass it over, pin it, or admire it, I think to myself: “maybe it really is that easy”, and in all honesty, I truly think it is.

When we think we are broken, we try to over-analyze everything. We try to take a simple statement someone said to hurt us and re-arrange it. We try to make a list of all the possible things it could mean in order for it to make sense to us; in order to make it a little easier to swallow. We think that if we are able to hit on this complicated meaning hidden behind a simple statement we will finally feel satisfied, fold it up & tuck it away because it’s suddenly so much easier to move on.

However, I think that simple statements are honestly sometimes just as simple as they sound. Sometimes things don’t make sense. If you’re constantly trying to make those ends meet, to tie them up until you’re satisfied, you’re just going to be stuck with your hands full of knots.

He said what he said because he meant it. Not because its a test, or a bump in the road, or some puzzle we have to figure out. He said it SIMPLY because he meant it.

And if he did mean it, you need to stop analyzing why. You need to let it go simply because its heavy. If he left, let him go, because its much too heavy to spend your time trying to figure out why. He left because he wanted to. It was his decision to make & he made it. Its simple. For the sake of your soul, allow it to be that simple.

I’m proud of who I was in this relationship & at the end of the day that is all that matters. I’m proud of the person I became & the way I ebbed and flowed in a way I wasn’t able to in previous relationships. I stopped actively building up my defenses in the off-chance someone hurt me. I stopped carrying hurtful words around with me & guarding my heart with a bullet-proof vest. I stopped sticking my finger into wounds that were nearly healed just to make sure they were still there.
Instead, I gave everything I had to someone who decided that they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) give anymore in return. And that’s okay. IT’S OKAY. Not because it doesn’t hurt, but because at the end of the day, I know I gave it everything I had. I emptied myself out for this relationship, but whats more important is that I allowed myself to fill back up again. Because emptiness is heavy. & you have to let it go.

I know that there is nothing I could have said or done for the outcome to be different.The problem doesn’t lie with me, its with him. I did a good thing: I loved someone fully & I won’t allow myself to be punished for it. You shouldn’t either.

No matter how badly you wish otherwise, sometimes some doors lead you no where & you have to close them. You can’t stare at door frames waiting for him to walk back through them with all the answers. As if that will make you whole again. Because sitting in an empty room waiting for him to come back & piece you back together isn’t healthy. Decorating your walls with his “I’m sorry’s” won’t make this house a home.

He didn’t make you whole. You were already whole before him & you’ll be whole after him.
Close the door behind you & don’t look back.