The first time i tried to make a boy love me....

-

 



The first time I tried to make a boy love me, I failed dismally. 

My boyish structure and introverted nature made sure I did not stand a chance next to the curvaceous and confident girls in my grade, and, yes, I compared. Every single day I compared myself to every other girl around me. “Why was I not as interesting as they were?”, I wondered to myself. What was it about me that made nobody interested in me romantically? The only thing I could think of was that I was not beautiful enough. Yes. That had to be it.

 So, I was not surprised when, the second time I tried to make a boy love me again, I failed. I sort of expected it. 

I did it some more after that and eventually, it became a game I played with myself. How many times could I throw myself against the rocks and still come out standing? 

The answer is: as many times as I felt the need to mask my feelings of abandonment with something less confounding. That is what love did for me back then, or  what I thought was love. I have claimed to love many boys in my life. Boys I did not know anything about, boys I spent years fantasizing about and boys whose last name sounded good next to my name. 

Every time I tried to make boys love me, I did not really want them to love me. I wanted to write sad girl poems and cry at 3am at night because that way, I could ignore the loss and hurt that was already going on inside of me. If  boys did not love me back then I did not have to deal with the fact that I did not love myself and that I spent my whole life wishing I were someone else. My teenage mind sought to explain the lack of self-love with the lack of outward affirmation but we all know how that story ends, yeah?

Sometimes I feel as though my love is too much. Too deep, too consuming. I imagine myself in scenarios where the object of my desire actually reciprocates. But then I look at their demeanour and conclude that they cannot possibly be feeling what I am feeling because if they did, they would not be so calm about it. You see I have taught myself that love is an insatiable feeling, a consuming wildfire that consumes they who it deems worthy of its affections and yet, that is wrong. Love is not an unknown phenomenon, it is a decision. Behind that decision is the character of a man or a woman who gives it permission to live. If I allow my desire for them to take over my entire being, it is not because love on it’s own broke off it’s leash and decided to run off in their direction but because I have chosen to let it go there. My choices and the amount of self-control I choose to exercise over it.

I know now that it was not about romantic love. I attended enough counselling sessions to know that that my childhood trauma left me with more scars than I thought and that the only thing I truly needed then was healing. I am so glad I did not get reciprocation back then and that I did not ever get to date until I was old enough to understand the hurt that was inside of me.

I am also glad that the last time i tried to make a boy love me, to make him fill this gaping hole inside of me, it did not work. You see there are blessings that come disguised as rejections and this one is one of mine. I am relieved that when I thought I deserved what was available at that time, God was gracious enough to take it away from me. I am glad that like the good father he is, he took the harmful thing away from me before I damaged myself some more. 

In all the instances that I sought out love, I was immature and was looking for love to not just complete me, but to  cover me. I wanted it to replace me so that because of it, I might not have to be myself anymore. The older I grow and the more I walk with God though, I realize that the remedy for a perpetual emptiness within is not the accumulation of superficial admiration or counterfeit affection, but with the love of Him whose love and righteousness covers our every inadequacy. The point has never been to find a human being to make it all make sense, but to stand in the uncertainty of it all and admit that without Him, all I feel is the emptiness and void.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Daddy's Girl 101 Part 2: Love Cannot Be Earned....

-
Image
  The more that I walk this Daddy's Girl journey, the more observations I find myself making about girls (or people, if you will) who are thriving in their Daddy-daughter relationships.  This time I found myself harshly judging somebody for making a mistake that I deemed really fatal. I just could not wrap my head around the fact that somebody with a present father could let him down like that and then it hit me that actually, it was these people who have the privilege of being born into loving families with stable parental figures who made all these seemingly silly mistakes. Why? If I had that kind of background. I told myself, I'd never do anything to jeopardize it. I'd show them that I was worth loving because I would never let them down. This was my line of thinking and I was neck-deep into judging people I did not know enough about when it hit me! Of course they made mistakes! Life is about making mistakes, learning and growing from them, not about trying to walk th...
Read more

The Grateful Series: Intro💫

-
Image
My beautiful readers🎉! On the 24th of December it will be a year since i wrote my first post, since i first let you all in to my mind and my heart and i can honestly say i have grown so much since then. What i originally intended as a platform to express my thoughts, and my deepest, darkest feelings somehow turned into a sort of post office where i can send you all my love and light and poetry. Somewhere in the middle of the year i went from writer to artist, from complaining about straws( yes! That post happened this year!😂) to declaring my love for the human race and it's flaws. I discovered that i wanted to do more than just analyse things and write about them, but that i also wanted to to use words to heal people. Now, i don't know if i have succeeded but I do know that i will continue working on this all the way into the oncoming year so at some point, it will have to work. I recognize that art is nothing if it does not add value therefore, i am dedicated to addin...
Read more

Non-conformist is a label

-
Image
I am a non-conformist who hates labels. Yes, i see the irony in that statement. I'm still trying to find a way to describe myself without using that phrase because, well, we have already established why. I hate labels and non-conformist on it's own is a label. Before i explain my attitude towards labels, I'd like to point out why i identify as a non-conformist, among other things. The first time i deliberated the word conformist was at a university information session. The recruitment officer asked me to stand up and tell everyone the story of how i came to apply to the school and what the application process was like because i had already been accepted to the university. I remember feeling like being picked on just ruined my chances of fitting in with these other kids. What should have made me proud instead made me feel different and wierd, something i really didn't want because i was already a loner. People tell me that i spoke well that day but honestly, i did t...
Read more