I was the unfortunate recipient of some really, god-awful advice when I was a wee middle schooler. It was a Friday afternoon and I was, as per usual, in love with the idea of love. I hung on every word my language arts teacher shared with my doe-eyed class as she acted like she was granting us the holy grail of the dating Bible. The advice was this: ‘Not if, but when you fall in love with someone, for the right reasons, and you love them unconditionally, selflessly, with boldness and braveness, they will surely fall in love with you too because selfless love is hard to ignore. It’s hard to walk over. It almost always is requited…’ I remember sighing a self-satisfied ‘ah-ha’, because if there is one quality I have always possessed, it’s a relentless work-ethic. If all a person has to do to find true love is love selflessly and boldly, shouldn’t such drive benefit me in my love life? Can you see where this train wreck is heading?
Seasons changed and I grew up from an awkward and dopey girl into the quirky and creative lady I am today, but the hopeless romantic within me always hung onto those words bestowed upon me at such an impressionable age. Thus, I approached every new relationship with a great capacity to love. My heart was wide open and up for grabs. I found myself constantly pouring into other people at great expense to myself. If I was making someone else happy or fulfilling someone else’s dreams it didn’t matter how I felt about it all, because at the end of the day I was loving my friends and family and would-be boyfriends fiercely… right? I poured into unhealthy and unbalanced relationships. I spent so much time believing truly, that if I only loved hard enough, selflessly enough and for the right reason, someday magically, a prince charming would swoop in and say, ‘Hey… I see you. I recognize the capacity you have to love, and I’ll raise the stakes! Let me love you back for a change and let me love you well…’ But no such luck, because as it turns out, we live in selfish world ladies, driven by the words ‘me, me, me,’ and selfless love will get walked all over. It is easy to ignore and it often times goes unappreciated and unrequited.
At this point, I’m sure if you're still bearing with me you’re wondering why the sob story, Polly? This is damn depressing… My mistakes now seem so obvious on paper, how stupid can I actually be to have believed in such a fairytale ideology and to have seemingly wasted so much time getting walked all over. Well, hang in there, oh faithful reader, cause I swear by the time this post is through, not only will your day shine a little bit brighter but hopefully I’ll have successfully preached to the choir (cause I’m working on taking all of this to heart myself).
I was recently having a conversation with a dear friend of mine, bSmart blogger, Nelly Calhoun, regarding my acknowledgement of this vicious cycle I’ve witnessed in my own life in regards to love and being loved in return. We both were in states of woe… I’m talking white wine drinking, chocolate eating woe… the worst kind of stereotypical woe! A few drinks in, I unintentionally posed the question, ‘How many times can a person’s heart be broken and still remain reparable?’ Honestly though, at what point is a human heart so beaten and loaded down with baggage that it has nothing left to give to the world… Again, a sad thing to think about and a daunting prospect to take on alone. But it was in the midst of this conversation that I experienced elation and began a healing process arguably ten years in the making.
Find the beauty in your mistakes and rediscover the masterpiece that is your flaw-filled, uniquely yours, mosaic heart.
Picture your heart (Come on! Do it!). Beating and brilliant. The nuclease of that which makes you breath and that which makes you feel… Picture it. See it broken and torn down (Because the reality is, we’ve all been there). See it bruised and stomped on into a million shards of heart-colored glass. See your tiny little self surrounded by your ‘heart-shaped wreckage’ wielding a glue stick, trying desperately to piece your once full and glittering heart back together…but pieces have gone missing along the way and such puzzles are much harder figured out alone. It’s a sorry sight. But now I challenge you to take that image and turn it on it’s head and what I mean by that is this - every broken heart is merely an opportunity to create a beautiful mosaic. Your heart is your own work of art and with the help of others, can be repaired to be even more brilliant than before. For example, over the years I’ve lost the ability to trust freely. Thanks to the golden soul of my friend Nelly, I’m relearning. She, like me, loves fiercely and is taking time investing in me. Is she the prince charming I dreamed would save the day? Nope! But the reality is I wouldn’t have it any other way. She’s adding her own flecks of gold to my mosaic heart. She’s journeying through my wreckage alongside of me and adding unconventional beauty along the way. I could go on and on about all the colors and gems my heart is now comprised of thanks to wonderful family members and friends and thanks to how they have invested in me and in my journey. But the reality is, I never would have experienced such growth and such beauty had I never been broken in the first place.
I know the mosaic imagery is a little cheesy but here are my takeaways from all this: Allow yourself to love and love greatly but do not have unrealistic expectations. Know that the world in which we live is very self-oriented. Allow yourself at times to be righteously selfish (and accept that that’s ok). Work to invest in others but work also to protect yourself. When you do inevitably face heart-break, because we all have or we all will, look at it as an opportunity (easier said than done… I know…). Understand that other wonderful, selfless people will present themselves to help put you back together if only you are willing to be open to seeing them. They may appear when you least expect it and in a different human than you anticipate but in the midst of shitty relationships, you will be surrounded by acts of human kindness…you gotta be willing to see them because they are the silver lining of life. Find the beauty in your mistakes and rediscover the masterpiece that is your flaw-filled, uniquely yours, mosaic heart.
As for me, I’m walking forward. I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’m seemingly eternally single, a senior in college, and I have no idea what life has in store for me. I’m not living by the advice I held onto for so long, but rather I’m learning how to heal. It’s not a perfect process but let’s be real…when my life is all said and done I’ll be happy to call it my masterpiece. Walk boldly today and be kind. You never know whose heart you're repairing.
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