Tough Lessons

What advice would you give your younger self? - It's graduation season, I see that question tossed around often in some form these days.

One of the hardest lesson I would go back and give my very young self (like I wish my heart at 8 knew this deeply) is:

You can never love someone enough to make them stay - or to love you in return. And you will encounter many who you will humble with your love - and many that are narcissists that will do nothing but parasite every ounce of kindness that you can muster up and give.

Not only will they take and take, they will invest in you only in small doses, and at strategic times, to keep you cycling love into them so they can retain control over you.

Learn to recognize them quickly. And after two red flags end it. Run away. Put them in the grave of your life and never look back.

Why? Because they will kill you. Gradually. And as much as you love them, as much as you've invested in them, they will kill you. And every ounce of your future with it.

You can walk away, but never look back. Don't pine over them. Don't hate yourself for as much as you put into them, or that you didn't run away fast enough. But know you can never go back. Don't let the love you have poured out be seen as it was for nothing to the point where you can be talked into trying again.

No matter how much you love them, you cannot keep them in your heart, in your soul. Only the metaphorical grave should be their home.

Because loving and wanting something that will in the end kill your joy, your hope, your heart, your will, because they are strategic and will continue to slowly drain you until you don't recognize yourself in the mirror.

But it's not always people that can do this to us. Maybe it's a job that we loved that we want to do again and we overlook all the other positions in other fields because we can't let go of a season in our life.

Maybe it's a dream we are chasing and we put everything on hold to chase it without realizing there are steps that have to be endured before we achieve it, but we are so swept up in the end product that we can't learn the immediate lessons that will promote us to holding firmly what we eventually want.

And the fact we can't let go of these things shackle us. Sure, these things may not be in our immediate reach, but our commitment to them binds us in our hearts, vision, minds, souls, to that which taints the environment around us.

We feel like we are constantly fighting or failing in the things we should be easily walking in successfully, and we just can't break free of these trip-ups, through these walls that we keep hitting. We know that something just isn't right.

Maybe, it's because we've weighed ourselves underwater with a heart devoted to that which it should not. Things that we have to let go of for our freedom, for our health, for our lives, for our success to be unhindered. The weight keeps us from breathing and it's only a matter of time until.......

This is why some things and people/relationships belong deep in the grave of our lives. Cruel, maybe. Vital, absolutely. Hard, the words you have to use to get through to yourself that you need to break the surface and breath and never look back are sharp, harsh, raw, but necessary.

Freedom. At all necessary costs.

 

©Kristen Garcia 06-2019