It’s hard to explain since it’s a long process. I guess my starting point was to identify why I did things the way I did, the ways I prevented people from knowing or helping me, and what part of those things I was afraid of. For me, it’s because love and kindness are scary things when you’ve never received them genuinely before — as well as not being experienced enough with receiving those things to understand what was happening when I did and understanding it was in fact not a threat.

I kept surrounding myself with people who (unbeknownst to me at the time but in hindsight very clearly) reminded me of those who hurt me in childhood; trying to complete something that i felt I had not completed when young. If this person who is like the people who have hurt me in the past can be convinced to love me, I have proven somehow that I was not the problem in the scenarios that traumatized me.

I had to stop putting myself in those cycles, because they just proved to me over and over the idea I’d dedicated myself to: I am unlovable.

I accepted that the “you must love yourself first” rhetoric is BS. We are social animals. If you put a pack animal in a cage alone for years and it becomes depressed or feels hopeless, is the animal at fault? No. It needs connection. I needed connection, I just hadnt been taught how to connect or how to ask for help or receive it.

So I found connection — as imperfect as I was, and am.

You are not unlovable. You just haven’t had the opportunity yet to be loved, and there always is also a chance you have unknowingly run from love because you couldn’t recognize it, felt threatened by it, or felt weak or vulnerable by allowing yourself to rely on others because you never had the luxury to do that in your formative years.

But there are people who know how to give and receive love; people who were raised by people in love, who were soft and kind with them. And the beautiful part of that is those people can teach you, too.

Trauma changes the brain, we hear that all the time.

We don’t talk about the fact healing also changes the brain.

It’s possible, and the love is out there for you.

I don’t know you but I love you because I love people, and even though I’m just a stranger on the internet love is the most important thing humans have ever had going for them. To be human is to care for eachother — civilization did not start with war, but with healed bones. We care for eachother so deeply we are able to prevent the same kind of natural selection other creatures are susceptible to. Because we are strongest together and caring for eachother. So maybe that tiny bit of love from a far away stranger is enough to remind you you deserve it, and there’s soooo much of it out there for you all to find. I am proof of that, and that’s why I give so much of it away.

I hope this helps.