untitled but this is not a love poem: it is a story in progress about self-worth.

1. This is not a love poem.

2. In fact, this is a story and it is one hundred percent not about love. Well, at least not the romantic kind. But, that’s not how it started.

3. It started with heartbreak which turned into a need for an outlet, a desire, an almost above me type of consuming urge to create and write all over again.

4. This, this mountain of a thing, is actually about a multitude of things but at the heart of it, lies a story of a girl who thought she might finally be featured in a story about love. Hint: I am the girl, the protagonist, the anti-hero, if you will, who experiences and even maybe is an active participant in all of the lust, mind games, toxicity, manipulation and endless make-out sessions that follow. There was a time where this girl confused all of those as love. Or at least something I truly thought might have resembled a form of it. But I’ll warn you now, I am not the most reliable narrator.

5. I desire healing and in order to help me heal I was advised to do what I love most, which is create stories about what I know and feel because writing is cathartic for me. So here it goes:

6. There once lived a girl who desired all forms of love. Out of all of them, self-love was the hardest kind of love. At least for this girl, it’s the one she always gets wrong or forgets all about, it’s the one that feels almost like a foreign language to her, something out of her finger’s reach yet the one she aches for it most. The one she is in desperate need of. She is a girl who wants to be better, who desires to see a better woman looking back at her when she stares at herself in the mirror.

7. Self worth and self love are the ones she struggles to get right, but still, the girl is resilient. Stubborn, even. She wants it. But it does not come easy. She has a hard exterior to protect the soft interior. Toxicity is addicting and comfortable for her. She enjoys the chaos sometimes, and commitment seems stressful. Unachievable even. She would rather be alone, she thinks. She is strong enough to be alone. She does not need love, she thinks. She refuses to allow herself to be soft and kind, despite her wanting nothing more than that in return. She needs strength, because she has always been strong enough to be alone and realistically, will always need to be.

8. And yet, she is fragile.

9. Deep down, she fears she is not worthy or deserving of any kind of love, let alone one that is like a flower, something she must continually water and give sunlight and make an effort to maintain, because she was never taught any of those skills. She hates being alone but worries that is what her destiny is doomed to be: a lonely, lonely life.

10. Sometimes this girl worries she’s fucked for life.

11. Sometimes she turns to substances to fill the void. And sometimes, it makes everything so much fucking worse.

12. This girl has an addictive personality, so when she’s not smoking or drinking, she’s trying to distract herself with people who do not see her worth. How could they when this girl could barely even see her own?

13. She sits in the darkness, wallows in her misery and pain and opens her laptop, stares at the blank google doc page, and writes.

14. So here I am.

15. And I'm so fucking over having a victim complex.

16. I want a love that is soft, tender and pure. Not anything easy, but safe, and always worth fighting for.

17. So I’ve decided that instead of sitting around and waiting for someone to give me it, I am just going to actively choose to spend everyday giving it to myself.

18. When I want to write about love, it never feels easy. When I want to give myself love, it never ever feels easy. Before I can give access to all the light that lives within me, I must first go through all the piles of heavy matters that do nothing but weigh me down. Often, it feels like darkness encompasses my heart and soul. Sometimes, it feels like it embodies who I really am. But submitting to that type of mentality has never ever served me. I am now choosing happiness, I am choosing to lead with light and love. It isn’t easy and I don’t even feel close to figuring it out. But I owe it to myself to see it through.