Let Yourself Be Loved

My heart is broken.

Shattered into a million pieces.

And it's my fault. I broke us. I ran away.

I gave up the most big-hearted, kind, loving man who ever existed.

Because I was scared.

Because I thought he must have been wrong to love me.

I thought he was mistaken.

I thought I wasn't worthy of being loved.

So I ran.

I ran across the country and he didn't follow. He couldn't follow. Somehow I knew he wouldn't follow, because his roots ran deep in that place and he had unfinished childhood work to do.

And my roots ran deep in this place and I needed to come home to heal my childhood trauma. I needed to return to the place where I first felt unloved and to find that love for myself within me.

Kind Man was everything I was looking for in a partner and more that I didn't even know I wanted or needed. He held me when I cried and supported my emotional exhaustion from a job I should have given up years ago.

But in my learning to receive. I never gave him anything in return.

I took him for granted.

Like he said: I didn't see and acknowledge his worth.

And he's right.

I didn't.

And it's only now, sitting alone in my house on the other side of the country, tears streaming down my face in unfiltered sorrow do I understand what I've lost.

A man who adored me but who I couldn't adore in return when it mattered.

A man who would do anything for me, but I was too selfish to do anything for him in return.

A man whose values I share and creative, interesting mind I admire, but I couldn't let his ideas become part of my ideas.

I cut him off because he didn't come, but I had set him up to fail because he needed to be there. He needs to be there. And I needed to be here.

And so, now, we sit grieving on opposite sides of the country, apart from each other, our dreams in tatters and our hearts in pain.

And I hurt him.

So very deeply.

And I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to heal. I don't know how to heal the shattered pieces of my heart, or his. Or if it's possible to weave our lives and hearts back together.

Kind Man was my first boyfriend at 42. I had spent most of my life chasing after emotionally unavailable men and when I had an emotionally available man right beside me, my inability to be in a relationship and my sense of safety went into panic mode. I froze and then I fled.

Why? Because my childhood expectations of love were criticism and judgement. Anything other than this was so uncomfortable, I couldn't sit with it.

I couldn't allow myself to be loved by him or his family.

I couldn't trust his word when he said he was coming.

I couldn't leave my heart open and vulnerable for hurt and ironically, I am hurting more now than I have ever remembered.

And so, I do what I know to help myself, I write about my experience in the hope that someone just like me reads this and doesn't take their relationship with a most wonderful partner for granted, who tames their ego and does the work to heal their childhood woundings WITH their partner, not away from them. I write this in the hope that nobody ever has to feel how I feel right now because they were too scared to be loved. I write this in the hope that Kind Men all over the world know that it is a superpower to completely love and adore someone and to hold them while they struggle with their inner demons.

But I also understand why Kind Men would let people like me go, because sometimes loving someone is not enough if we don't love ourselves.

©Alyssa Curtayne 2020