Walking Away

If someone cannot reciprocate your love, if someone cannot give you what you truly deserve, you have to understand that aching for them to do so before they are ready is a form of self destruction.

Your heart is a vast and tender thing, you cannot keep trying to shrink it into what someone else needs. You cannot keep pouring your love into a vessel that cannot contain it. You cannot keep pouring your love into a soul that has not opened their eyes to all that they are receiving. You cannot keep pouring your love into a heart that is closed off to it. It will only leave you empty. You have to walk away. You have to let this person grow on their own terms, because you can’t love someone into their potential. You can’t love someone into being ready. They have to do that on their own.

And I know how hard it is to walk away from someone you deeply care for. I know how hard it is to lay all of that love down. . . . But in walking away you will learn how to pour all of the love that you were giving to the wrong person, back into yourself. And you will learn how to pour it into all that you desire in life, you will learn how to pour it into your growth, into your art, into your hope. You will learn how to stand up for your feeling, how to stand up for its value.

And when you teach yourself that you deserve to be loved, without having to beg for that love, without having to chase that love down, you open yourself to the kind of beauty that chooses you just as freely as you choose it. You open yourself to the kind of people who see you and immediately know that you are a rare and beautiful thing. You open yourself to new beginnings, to a future that unfolds in ways that don’t hurt or break you down, but rather, build you up, and show you just how worthy you are of having your heart held.

– Bianca Sparacino
Excerpted from “You Cannot Love Someone
Into Their Potential”
Thought Catalog
November 22, 2019

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• The Empty Beach
• Wendy Matthews: Free, Like the Wind
• In This In-Between Time
• Adnan . . . with Sunset Reflections and Jet Trail
• Adnan . . . Amidst Mississippi Reflections
• The Gravity of Love
• The Choice (and Risk) That Is Love
• Love as Exploring Vulnerability
• Dew[y]-Kissed
• The Path Ahead

Related Off-site Link:
Let Go of the People Who Aren’t Ready to Love You – Brianna Wiest (Thought Catalog, December 30, 2019).

Image 1: Michael J. Bayly.
Image 2: A. Ahmed A.