The Softest Truths About Love

Fear has worn different faces for me.

When my health was at its worst, I felt it wrap around me before I even moved, making me step back before I even tried.

When I returned to normal life, I acted as if that part of my story never existed. Lost in forgetting that I had fought my biggest fear and survived, everyday struggles began surrounding me with new fears.

After my harsh breakup, my sense of self was shaken. I did not doubt who I was, but I doubted whether that person was lovable.

I began to fear catching feelings for someone again, because as soon as I did, I knew I would be handing the wheel to another, losing my control, left with feeling powerless.

Yet, I still longed for the kind of love that would consume me in all the right ways. I wanted passion, adventure, even a little danger.

That is why whenever my heart’s pace felt unusual, my mind did not delay in romanticising everything there was and everything there was not. Compelled by a recurring question that kept me imprisoned,

What if love passed through me like a wind, forcing me to spend a lifetime without ever attaining it?

I feared missing out on the most exquisite human experience.

That was when my existential dilemma revealed its colours. I longed for love, I feared not having it, yet my fear of rejection weighed too heavily on me.

Shaping myself into something more palatable to avoid rejection, I began to present what might be lovable. Even so, no performance can hold what is not rooted in truth.

While looking for meaning underneath what was simply a passing moment, I was searching for love in all the wrong places.

Three months ago, my stage hosted a French man who felt like a painkiller to my nervous system, bringing excitement, happiness, and renewal.

Getting to know someone new never feels dull at first because everything you learn is fresh. My inner voice whispered,

“See? You are not unlovable after all. There is someone who wants to stay.”

What time reveals is whether the excitement comes from novelty or from true attraction. Mine turned out to be the first, but at the time healing mattered more than any label.

When a bad experience leaves its emotional blueprint, our psyche starts expecting the same things to appear again and again. The nervous system spreads its signal to keep us safe, and we end up choosing what we know. Even when it is painful. Even when it is destroying us quietly.

Shortly after we began dating, I knew it did not feel right, but to protect myself from being hurt again, I stayed in what I thought was safe. In truth, it was just my familiar hell.

I did not want to suffer, but I brought suffering upon myself, avoiding my inner truth, I chose the quickest escape to create distance between me and my perceived pain.

My wound was still wet, so it needed time to recover.

Once again I became my own terrain, acting as if my emotions were a machine. Forsaking their limits for my redundant demands disguised as irreplaceable needs, until I was brought to a truth that felt terribly disturbing. I kept going back to sleepless nights and clenched jaws while my intuition whispered:

“You are not supposed to be here.”

But it was muted by my mental compulsions.

It echoed, but what it was saying was not clear, the words blurred so I never picked up its message.

As a highly sensitive over-thinker, whenever pain arrived I was too quick to act on my impulses whenever something felt like a rescue, a quiet relief that could ease my torment. My soul could not endure the wait, leaving me with unanswered questions on whether my choices were truly aligned.

They say opposites attract, but Frenchy and I were not even on the same spectrum. In the end, I was abandoned on a Greek island, walking into an empty room with an unlocked door and my things inside on the second day of a holiday that was meant to be seven.

Do not get me wrong, I had booked myself a separate Airbnb the night before; the holiday was absolutely horrible. Yet I had the decency to tell him in person, so I waited, and he took it as an advantage.

Either way, the point was never about who left first. He was just a side character cast by the universe to teach me a lesson I had refused to learn for twenty-seven years, despite each disappointment arriving with the same message.

Once again I chose forcefulness over myself, casting aside my intuition, only for my wound to grow larger than before.

With all there is and was, relationships built out of need never work in one’s favour. They strengthen the need for external validation, but validation only sticks when it touches something real. In the meantime, we become dependent on other people’s actions, the very thing we never have control over.

I expected my wound to vanish, thinking it was the end of the world if I got hurt again. The truth is, nothing is the end of the world except the end of the world itself.

Even so, I sought my healing in places it never belonged, just because relief seemed to arrive faster, though only for the short term.

The stakes were high since I was already bleeding, but I never stopped and asked myself:

What if I end up bleeding to death instead of healing?

After facing multiple back to back disappointments, a note landed exactly where I did not know I was hurting, and I turned inward.

I realised love does not need to be loud to be real and that realisation taught me to listen to my heart if it’s telling me that the bond isn’t mine to carry.

I realised, love isn’t something I can chase or shape myself to fit.

It is the quiet moments I have with myself while drinking my morning coffee.
It is the feeling that lingers whenever I finish reading a good book.
It is the stillness after rain, when fresh air makes me feel alive with every breath.
It is the joy of a cigarette after a good meal.
It is my best friend sending a croissant and a coffee to my door the morning after my birthday, knowing I went to bed feeling upset.
It is my grandmother smiling when she sees me at her doorway.
It is my father, who does not know English yet still has AI translate everything I write, just to stay close to my words.
It is the knowing that I will always have myself, welcoming every sunset as a quiet ending and every dawn as a new beginning.

In the softest truth, love is what begins to grow the moment you stop abandoning yourself.

Sometimes everything you need is held in a single glance.

Don’t wait to be seen. See yourself.

Don’t stay just because someone else stays. You’ll only come alive around the people you choose, not the ones who merely remain.

You are worthy of love, not despite but because of who you are.

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