Love thyself.

When I was a young girl, I read a line in one of my favorite books that has somehow stuck with me since then, or rather the last words in it have-“love is hard”.
I though I understood it, but I was wrong. Only age and experience really tells you how hard love is. Really tells you the depth of those words.
And it’s not only the romantic kind we are talking about here. No.
Love in all it’s forms-that for your friends, your siblings, your parents-is at the end of the day a strenuous task. And, as it is such a part of our daily lives, it’s neither inevitable nor abhor-able. It’s bittersweet in its pain. What the question ends up being is, if the bitter overpowers the sweet or vice versa.
The answer to that can only truly help you finally decide if it’s worth trying for more or should you give up.
But that’s the catch. You can never really give up, you can never really move on. What you can do is leave a piece of yourself behind and try to repress the need to go rushing back to that particular part. Repress your longings, your memories.
And hold with two hands, in fact your whole body, the door to that part closed forever.
So, no matter how easily we tell each other, “Give up. Move on. They aren’t worth it!”-both parties know that is not just hard, it’s partly not possible.
You might give up on a relation, but you can’t hold back the longing of the “what if”. You might move on, but a part of your mind is still mingled in what was, what you tried to make it be. And as you turn your back on it, your battered feelings will mourn what they lost and the hollowness in you will whisper that maybe it was worth it. Maybe you gave up too soon. Maybe…
But we can either let ourselves be stuck in relationships destined for doom, keep showering our love where it isn’t deserved and keep ourselves open to the hurt of being rejected in those million ways which people who have power over our hearts have mastered the art of doing.
Or we can accept the truth. What is that? It’s the fact that although our love for them will never be eradicated from us, although even the bitter moments with them our heart prizes and even though our mind keeps conjuring up the “what if” scenarios, it’s best to walk away with the little self respect we still have, with the little good in our relationships still intact rather then letting it all be marred by the darkness of pain and failure. To give up before the rejection is our undoing.
For when we do so, when we walk away before the tsunami of emotions was to destroy one or both of the parties we leave with a better chance of it working sometime in the future and most importantly we leave with some of our self love intact.
Because no love is harder then self love, none more scorned and bad-mouthed by the society.
None more important than it.
So protect yourself, your emotions, your sanity and walk away before it’s too late.
When you do, with the pain will be hope of another maybe.
Maybe in future we will be better, and till then you will be happy that you respected your own self.
If you can’t say those last words to yourself, the damage will be much worse then can be imagined. And you would have lost upon the most necessary love of all.

Love. Yourself. Be happy.