Embracing Vulnerability & Learning to Accept Love

I wonder if there are a lot of you out there like me who don’t really know how to be loved. Who can actually accept the feeling of being loved? I don’t know that I have ever let my defensive guard down enough to be truly vulnerable.  To actually feel important or dependent to someone. 

I’ve always loved being around babies and little children. Their cuddling and hugs have nothing attached to it. They don’t need to know if you are smart, successful, witty, or brave. They just love you because you love them. There is zero conditions to it except for meeting their primal needs and of course cuddling and kisses. Love is given and received based on trust, closeness, interpreting human survival needs.

I never let people see all the way into me and in a way held up walls to protect myself and my secrets I suppose.  I felt I had to be a certain way to attain praise and love. I felt if I wasn’t that particular way then I wouldn’t get love. I put who I was as a set of key characteristics that people would like. Always say thank you, be kind and giving to others, make others laugh, don’t be too sensitive, don’t be judgmental, don’t cause conflict, don’t make others not like you, don’t upset others, only give them the version of you that achieves all of those statements. Any other version of you is unlikeable and unlovable. Don’t let people love you, they will only let you down. You are not good enough for them, they will realize your too fat, too ugly, too dumb, too mentally ill, too spoiled, and when they do you will be left alone. Don’t let them in, don’t let them see, be the good girl you always have to be (oh how right you are, Elsa).

Well, I am definitely the type of person that is all or nothing, I decide to not just show Kevin, my kids, my family, and friends who I actually am, I decide to take the vulnerability that I have never given myself and throw it to the world. The funny thing is that I don’t care what those masses think because now I can be fully loved by those who actually always wanted to love me, all of me. I only need the acceptance of those closest to me and because I feel free of living out of my box of expectations, I think I can finally start to feel love.

Like a lot of things, I think this is a work in progress as I figure out my new reality. To feel love and to give love is dam scary. You have to be willing to fall, willing to lose, willing to say goodbye to it. I think after all I have learned I would rather lose love than never truly experience it. I’m so grateful for this second chance to kick down the guards. Real love doesn’t change if you say something dumb, if you have a double chin in pictures, it doesn’t change when you get angry, mad, or sad, those who love you will love you through those things. I know it sounds strange that this is like brand new information for me when it is something that everyone knows.

What a gift it has been to wake up and find something new that I could learn today. The possibilities sometimes seem infinite, we are never done learning, changing, and growing.

Chat again soon,

Michelle