I was left alone with my thoughts the other night. I know, scary.
With as many thoughts, ponderings, and evaluations that my mind processes at one time, it's an interesting situation to see what journey it will take me on. But for more than a quick moment, doubt crept in.
It chewed at me, something I normally don't entertain, let alone give space in my head. As someone who's run alone for most of my life, I know that one seed of doubt left to take even the smallest root can wreck havoc on any forward progress when you have to be your own greatest motivator.
But I gave it a moment to develop because sometimes, you have to look at doubt as not a moment of weakness, but a moment of internal vulnerability that can present a path of growth, if its fruit is used correctly.
And I doubted whether or not I was still too poured out and broken to love deeply again.
As I sorted through old reminders of love I have given away, a familiar ache grew, as did the doubt. Pain I thought long gone still somehow churning. A wall to guard a still sore soul I could feel being fortified again around my lingering pain.
Like grief that never quite heals, but just evolves, that cycle of retracting the bridge to my heart once again commencing - without a way to stop it in that moment. It's not a pretty place I like to go, as much as I do retreat into myself.
To love others in such a way it's a little bit terrifying to them to be loved deeply, purely, without asking anything of them... it's a very vulnerable way to live. Rejection and misunderstanding come often - people in their pain can run at the first sign of sincere kindness.
Only a few brave souls embrace it. Even fewer recognize it's a natural setting for a few of us walking the Earth and it's the only way we know how to be to the vast majority of the world around us. We have to find a means to output our love or we go insane.
An old adage says - we heal ourselves by offering that healing to others. It is very true. But when you live in that manner, it's scary sometimes to realize how much pain we still try to heal that lies within ourselves when we look at the outpouring we give to others. Especially in the moments when we recognize the pain we have carried before within the beings of those around us we care about.
And we begin to wonder if we really ever healed, or just kept ourselves busy enough to forget the pain, trying to be love and force for good in someone else's life that we never had in ours.
Trying to be the love we needed and never had to those around us, hoping somehow it will heal ourselves in that process is really an interesting world.
Can those two concepts really co-exist in a positive synergy within the same soul's spirit? Or, do they work against each other, canceling one another out, creating a perpetual cycle that can't be conquered but forever powered internally by their offsetting dynamics?
The doubt flared hard. The coolness in my heart that would not normally be there, a reflection of how many questions and memories were trying to be processed as the moments progressed.
I've loved deeply, only to have those offerings snatched and cruelly, intentionally, forcefully crushed. So many times, by so many people who held key roles at various times, that I genuinely wondered if I had it in me one more time to try and love deeply in that way again. Let alone try and see if there was a capacity to love even deeper than before.
And in that moment of being alone with my thoughts, I had a realization for the shortest second, that I couldn't genuinely, immediately say that I did.
There's little that really scares me - nay frightens me - and that realization did.
When a lover gets tired, drained, exhausted, wonders sincerely if they're too hurt to love deeply to another soul on various levels again, the world mourns.... and the doubter has a choice to make.
To retreat and disappear, or evaluate, identify, and be brave enough to push past the doubt.
What happens to a dream (love) deferred...... dreams (love) crushed.... love continually rejected?
It's what you do with the fruit of the doubt that defines who you are.
Somehow, at the end of it all, I know I will find a way - or better yet - life will find its own curious way to refill me - so that the depth of outpouring can continue - and run deeper than before.
Somehow.
