The Love That Is Allowed to Find You
The kind of love I am allowed to want is the steady, kind, ordinary kind. It is not too large a thing to ask for. It is not reserved for other people. It is allowed to find me.
Have you quietly come to believe that real love is for other people? People who are less tired. People who carry less history. People who, somehow, deserve it more than you do. After enough years of being told — in a thousand small ways — that you were the difficult one, the too-much one, the one who needed to earn your ordinary care, a person begins to suspect that ease itself was made for someone else.
That belief is a story from the old house. You do not live there anymore.
The love you are allowed to want is not extravagant. It is the morning that begins with someone's quiet voice that does not have weather in it. It is the room where a small disagreement does not threaten the whole afternoon. It is the steady company of a person who does not test your love against your responsiveness, your appearance, your usefulness, or the smallness you can fold yourself into.
You do not have to be finished healing to be worthy of that. You do not have to be easy. You do not have to perform any other version of yourself. The work you have done this year — the slow, faithful inner work no one outside of you has fully seen — has made you more capable of recognizing real care when it arrives, not less.
The right kind of love will not require you to keep proving yourself. It will not arrive in storms and then apologize through gifts. It will not love you for who you might become with enough effort. It will love the actual person, sitting in the actual kitchen, in the actual ordinary morning, exactly as you are on a Tuesday — tired sometimes, bright sometimes, quiet sometimes, all of it without needing to be edited.
You have stayed tender across a long, hard season. That tenderness is not a flaw to apologize for. It is the rarest of the qualities a real love will recognize. The person who can see it, and treat it gently, is the person whose company you have been allowed to want all along. You are the lighthouse on the shore. You do not chase the boats. The right vessel sees the steady light and comes carefully in.