l3tmer0t

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hearts of darkness (1991) dir. eleanor coppola, george hickenlooper, fax bahr

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Carrie Fisher, from The Princess Diarist.

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How to stop fearing love? When i think about me falling for someone it's always here with the shadow of grief and loss what if i loved so much that it might end and hurt more? I experienced grief and since then i fear losing anyone i love even tho i know no one can run away from death but it's not only death what if there is no place for me in the heart of those i adore? I never allowed myself to confess or be honest about my feelings for someone i love, i keep it as an idea i keep just daydreaming about it.

Love that you allow only to breathe as a fantasy, that you keep as a daydream to get lost in, that you put in a glass jar on the highest shelf for fear of what might happen if it's too close cannot--no matter how much you may hope for it, and no matter how much the love itself aspires to it--become Love. You can't hold love on a leash and expect it to grow; grief and loss are your entry tickets because for your love to be real it has to be honest. And honest love is a confrontation with the fact that it may not last. Love that is only there under a precondition cannot ever be free, and something that cannot exist freely cannot exist honestly. And what's a love worth--any kind of love--that isn't honest?

We hope that the people we love value us and care for us. We hope that they do so as much as we care for and value them. But I think the spectre of loss, terrifying as it is, does not necessarily have to become a noose around your neck: the difference between being confronted with sudden hurt and closing yourself away is that at least the hurt is real--it came from a real choice that you made, to be awake and present in the world with another person. The alternative is spending your whole life wondering "what if?": right now, it's what if I get hurt? But eventually, as time goes on, it becomes what if I'd been braver? What if I'd taken a leap? What if I'd tried with xyz? What would my life look like if I had? The difference between these, and get your heartbroken, is that heartbreak will, one day, find a place in your life, and you will be able to move on. Regret, however, has a far, far longer shelf life; it's almost impossibly to move on from a question you will never get an answer to.

All your fears and worries, anon, are natural and I think everyon has them, at some point or another. But when you lead your life with this fear--"What if there is no place for me in the heart of those i adore?"-- you're already guaranteeing that there can be no place because you are not allowing yourself the freedom to find that place. It's like saying "what if I never see the ocean?" but avoiding every trip to the beach that comes your way. And not only are you depriving yourself of genuine loving connections with other people, you're depriving them of the opportunity to give you those connections too (and hence your fear becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy).

I think at the end of the day, fear of love ending, fear of the hurt that follows, fear of what will happen to us as a result of that hurt is not down to whether or not you can trust that the love will last or fear of love at all to begin with; I think it's down to whether or not you trust yourself to be okay if it doesn't. And I think the prospect of falling in love, and then falling out of it, becomes far less terrifying when you look at it from that point of view. It's not can I trust you not to hurt me? It's can I trust myself to still love me if you do? Can I trust myself to still believe I deserve love and good things, even if you do? Can I trust myself to be okay for myself?

Because ultimately, it's not about other people having a place for you or not, it's not about knowing in advance that someone will never hurt you--you can't predict this about anyone, about any situation. But what you can rely on, what you can control is however you respond to it. Love is a dialogue, I think--it's a collaborative mode of being: there are two (or more) people in it working in tandem on something, towards something, but you don't cease to be two individuals in that process either. You still stand if the other isn't there: you must simply learn to navigate the space they leave behind and fill it up differently. You said you experienced grief once already--my question is: have you honoured that grief? More importantly, have you honoured the love that this grief came from and that you lost? Do you believe that you're honouring the importance & your memory of that love in your life by closing yourself off from the opportunity to ever experience it again, in different forms?

I think Vuong said somewhere that grief is the final translation of love and I believe that's true--but I also believe it does this love a profound disservice to measure it, value it, form a legacy from it purely from that grief alone. The love was there. Then grief came, yes. But the love was there. All hurt, all grief, all shattering sense of loss is a testament to the enormity of that love to begin with. It hurts as much as its worth, as they say. The grief isn't a punishment; it's to remind you of that worth. And the lesson from that grief, if we decide it's better to not open ourselves up to love and connection again, is, in my view at least, a diminishing of that worth.

I used to do rollerblading and ice skating, and possibly the only useful thing I can say on this is that fearing love is a lot like learning to balance on skates: you cannot go anywhere on those things as long as you are utterly petrified of falling to the ground. And you will keep being petrified until you do fall--but after that, you learn: you learn how to fall, and get back up, and you learn that the fall itself and what comes after is not nearly as terrifying or impossible as the anticipation of pain and inching along in terror for the rest of your life because of it. A few falls in, you slowly learn to trust yourself. There's no harrowing what if? anymore because you have something now you can work with (the fall hurts and it sucks and it is embarrassing but you're here, still) and use and learn from and become a braver version of yourself.

I don't know if any of this helps you, anon, but I sincerely hope it does and I'm sending you all my love through this 🤍

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I overconsume skincare because my sister is the smart one, my brother is the talented one and I'm the pretty one.

that's all I'll ever be and all I have to offer

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a girl of fear, a woman of anger— look how we've grown

girls contain multitudes, heather o'neill / king, florence + the machine / The Affront (L'affronto), by Antonio Piatti / In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado / this pin / cassandra, florence + the machine / What If This Were Enough?: Essays by Heather Havrilesky) / crush, richard siken / the closest thing i could find was this soundcloud link / a womans beauty, susan sontag / a vision of fiammetta, dante gabriel rossetti / stop me, natalia kills / fury, yevgeny yevtushenko

everyone say god bless you to @pe4rl-diver for the sources

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my dad always said english was a poor language. i never understood what he meant until I met a boy i could go on and on about in my mother tongue but no word in the english dictionary could describe what i felt about him

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“what if he likes blondes?” well im brunette all over so he won’t like me anyway

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he put his hand on the back of my neck and said "if we were the same religion maybe I would have liked you back"

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Your post showed up on my dash so, happy birthday!

Thank you !

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today i turn 20

my mother doesn't look at me because i look too much like my dad

my dad doesn't look at me because i remind him of a time he lost

my friends forgot my birthday but my cousins and siblings are excited

i woke up at 10 but didn't get out of bed till 12

the cavities in my teeth need to be filled and my hair is mess

i think my life is ending

i miss my teenage years already

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they said "he knows you're pretty, he just doesn't love you" and it's not fair.

it's not fair because all i am is pretty and nothing else. i'm just pretty. i'm not talented or funny or smart—

—but i look like those pretty women in renaissance paintings, the female lead of bollywood movies who take your breath away at first glance, the muse of poets, a marble statue carved thousands of years ago, been told by devotees that if god had a physical form it'd be mine

so why can't he be objective for once and just love me because i'm pretty?

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I wanted him to hold me, call me pretty, just give any type of attention. I liked him for 8 years, it's at the 9th I find out he saw me the same way he saw any other girl on street

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Maybe the most humbling part of my life was realizing that the guy friends I grew up with saw me the same was they saw any other girl, a whore, a toy, something to use and throw away.

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I asked my mother why she was so supportive of age gap marriages where the man is way older than the woman. she said "it's because us women rot faster than men"

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what should i do?

Destroy everything you identify with, then identify with something that you cannot destroy. I chose the sky, not any one cloud but I am the container

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. . . ⇢˗ˏˋwelcome to my diary ࿐ྂ

❝i always wanted to die clean and pretty❞