The Story I Used to Tell Myself about Love

When I got married the first time, I had the kind of love that I thought I deserved. I thought it was the best I was ever going to get. I thought love was hard because my marriage was hard. I didn’t trust my husband or perhaps I didn’t trust myself. Love was painful. Love hurt. It was a love of chains. I believed that his indiscretions meant that I wasn’t enough. I begged and pleaded and bargained for scraps at the table of our love. It is was a love of desperation, a love of need and neglect and I’m starting to wonder if it was ever love at all. But still, I stayed. I wounded myself by doing it, but I stayed long enough to learn that we can never save someone. But we can drown together.

It took a long time to find the courage to leave. To believe that not having a love like that was better than nothing at all. And honestly, I didn’t think that I would find love again. I was 23 years old. Just a girl really. Sometimes still I’m sad for that girl. That girl who if she didn’t believe she was enough, how could she ever say “enough”? What a devastating lie to believe that worth is measured by someone else’s behavior. That enoughness is external.

If you would have told that girl that in 10 years she would be married to an amazing man and they would be traveling the world together, that she would be happier than she ever imagined, that her life is unbelievably beautiful, full of wonderful people and amazing experiences and that love is mutual liberation, that love looks like dancing, love feels like joy, love sounds like laughter, that love is so, so bright…she would have found it unfathomable. When we’re in the darkness, it’s hard to trust the light will come. But it does. It always does.

Someone can tell us a million times that we deserve better, but until we believe it, until we own our worth and deservingness…our stories about love will stay the same. Begging for crumbs, feeling like we barely have a seat at the table. When the truth is we deserve a banquet all day, every damn day. We deserve our own table. We deserve the throne. And we deserve someone to love us the way we long to be loved. A love of safety, of being known and seen and respected. A love that grows and nourishes, a love of mutual liberation.

I hope you don’t. Don’t have to go through hell to find happiness. But then again, healing is holy. And if you do go to the depths, I hope the journey home is glorious. I hope it’s a banquet. I hope it’s a throne. I hope it looks like dancing and sounds like laughter and feels like joy. I hope it’s brighter and more beautiful than you ever dreamed.