How To Receive the Love You’ve Already Been Given
Hint: you have to be the one to let it in
Permission To soften
Love ripples Echoes across time (There) for you to receive When you are ready
For a long time, I did not know how to receive love.
It is something I’m only now learning. I don’t think I truly realized how long I’d pushed love away until this past January, when I encountered some cards I’d been given nearly five years ago.
Five years ago. 2017. That’s when I moved out on my own, when I left my hometown to pursue my dreams. I was eighteen at the time, a few months away from turning nineteen, and maybe that’s young for some but it was the only thing that felt right for me at the time. It was the only future I could imagine.
When I left, I ran. I couldn’t get away fast enough. The previous decade had been riddled with trauma, and I think I was so ready for a fresh start I couldn’t see any of the beautiful things I was leaving behind. I’ve always considered myself a very loyal person — I used to say I was a ride-or-die kind of friend, that once you were my friend, you were my friend for life. I’ve since learned that … it’s not that simple. But at the time, this was my worldview, and through that worldview it was unfathomable that I could move away if there were people I was leaving behind.
It’s not that I cut ties with everyone I’d ever loved when I left, more like I told myself they didn’t love me as much as they actually did. They didn’t love me for me, I said. They didn’t love me enough.
Except, my perspective was a little skewed.
Among the friends I’d grown up with, I was always something of an outlier. They admired my dedication to my rigorous training, but none of them could really understand it, not in an embodied way. None of them had lived that life. None of them had sacrificed social gatherings and hang outs in pursuit of some long-term goal. None of them spent hours in the gym working out or watched what they ate so meticulously they never allowed themselves any sugar. At this point in my life, I did not understand balance, and since they couldn’t understand so much of how I lived, I told myself these people couldn’t really love me. Not in the way I’d craved.
I have this box of mementos sitting up on a shelf in my living room. The box itself came from a trip I took to Brazil with my family when I was eleven years old — my dad had been an exchange student when he was young and we were there visiting his host family for Christmas. His host mother had given me this intricate wooden box I loved but didn’t know what to do with at the time. These days, it’s filled with cards and notes from loved ones, a letter my grandmother wrote for me to open years after she’d passed away.
Essentially, it’s a box of love.
I don’t know what came over me this one night in January, but I decided to open the box. I do this periodically, mostly to read my grandmother’s letter. I can’t remember the last time I actually read the rest of the cards inside.
This particular night was cold and dark, with snow blowing outside my window, and I was feeling a bit lonely. I live alone and I love it, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times when it gets hard. So, I reached up on my toes and pulled down the box.
I began to leaf through the cards, reading the words my friends and family had left me. Cards I received when I left my hometown that I forgot I’d ever been given, read once and stored away, just waiting to be remembered. Cards have always meant a lot to me, probably because I am a writer and words are so essential to my being, so I was a little surprised I’d forgotten these gifts so easily.
Tears sprung to my eyes as I felt the love in their words. One friend told me how patient and kind I was, how she admired my dedication and how I kept up with all her wild energy. Another friend told me she saw my independence and inner strength, yet “I must impress upon you, you need not to do everything on your own.”
It’s okay to lean on people sometimes.
Ah, my dear friend, this is something I’m still learning.
Friendship is something I’ve struggled with for many years. I constantly feel indebted to the people who choose to love me, that I somehow need to prove my worth through my helpfulness or else they’ll leave and I’ll be left all alone. At the same time, I assume that I’m not that important — if I’m not there, I reason, there’s always someone else they can speak to. It’s not like I’d leave some particular Maia-shaped void or anything. Anyone could fill the space I leave behind. I could just disappear and no one would notice.
Yet objectively, I also know this isn’t true.
I know there is something special about my energy, something certain people gravitate towards, something that would be hard to replace if I wasn’t there.
The reasons people love us are so intangible, it can be hard to believe they’re true sometimes. Rarely do our friends say, “You know, she always cooks for me and that’s why I keep her around.” If they do, that’s not a friendship, that’s a transaction.
If asked, it’s more likely they’d say, “He always knows the right thing to say when I’m feeling down,” or “I can laugh with her,” or “She makes me feel like the best version of myself. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. Life is just better when she’s around.”
The thing about love is that you have to be the one to let it in.
I remember having this conversation with a friend once. I was asking him why he’d stayed friends with me when I’d been such an asshole to him. There was this phase in my life when, if I didn’t know how to deal with someone, I would simply ignore them. Like, flat-out, if they spoke I would stare straight ahead and pretend I didn’t hear them. These were not some of my finer moments, if I may say. Still — this friend stuck around, and he wasn’t the only one. I wanted to know why.
He shrugged and said it wasn’t the first time that had happened. Apparently he had higher self-worth than I did, because if someone ignored me I probably wouldn’t stick around. But then he said, “I found you interesting.” He liked the way I saw the world. It was fascinating to him.
There it was again, that intangible thing that made him choose to stay.
These days, I am getting better at letting people love me. Paradoxically, I think the thing that has enabled me to do this is spending an inordinate amount of time solely in my own company. When you spend two years in intense isolation, you are faced with all your patterns — the good, the bad, the downright harsh and ugly. For me, the most advisable way to survive this all was to learn to be kind to myself.
These days, I can pretty confidently say I enjoy my own company. Maybe not all of the time, but most of it. I am learning how to soften my tone when I speak to myself and meet those harsh voices with compassion.
As I do, my armour has begun to melt away.
It’s slow going — the metal is rusty and the edges are sharp, and sometimes I come away with cuts on my hands in the process. But the more I find spaces where it’s safe for me to truly be myself, the more I open to receive the love that has always been there for me.
The more I learn I’ve always been worthy of love, exactly as I am.
The more I learn I’ve always been more than enough.
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