I cannot be by myself.
I will admit it. I just can’t. But who amongst us can?
I need someone to hold me, to hold me up, to tell me it’ll all be okay. We all do sometimes. We all want someone to love us enough to lay down next to us every single night and never let us go.
I suppose it’s fair to say how high this priority lays on the list varies from person to person, but can anyone in clear conscience, in all honestly, tell me they want to spend the rest of their life completely isolated from all signs of life?
You can say I’m wrong, I won’t be offended. But I also won’t agree. I think deep down, we all want that sense of safety and hope.
I know this now.
I used to think love was… well, I used to think it was a lot of different things. But I realized that as much as we’d love to think it’s as simple as “we must love ourselves before another can”, it also holds true that sometimes, we simply need someone else to remind us how loveable we are. Because we live in a world in which it’s so easy to forget how good we are. How beautiful we are. How worth it we are.
We’re not incapable of loving ourselves. But we are very capable of self-sabotage, of low self-esteem, and of losing hope when life goes to hell. We’re capable of forgetting all the good moments when the bad moments are all that seem to be thriving around us.
Each and every single one of us.
We’re all brave, all strong. But sometimes we need someone else to remind us how strong we can be. No, not a Knight in Shining Armor or Prince Charming or a Savior to prevent us from ever falling but simply to remind us that we are capable of getting up if we do fall. Someone to remind us that we’re capable of surviving in spite of how fucked up life can get.
A while ago, my boyfriend told me something that sounded as true as 2+2=4:
That is what a true partnership should be like.
We’re not children anymore. We don’t need nor should we want someone to take care of us, to do everything for us. And I’m not saying that there aren’t moments in which I’d prefer to sit in the library alone and read or that I want to stay attached at the hip with everyone I love. We all need room to breathe. But that feeling that there’s someone out there waiting for us to come home safe every night — that feeling is enough to give us a shot of energy that’ll keep us going for a lifetime.
