The Last Person I Thought To Love

A Valentine’s Day Essay _______________________________________ Let me tell you about someone I know. They’ve spent the better part of a decade chasing love like it was something you could catch if you ran fast enough, wanted it badly enough, or were willing to walk into someone else’s storm just to feel something close to it. They stirred chaos where there could’ve been calmPulled away from hands that reached for themTested hearts that were openPushed people past their limits and then wondered why everyone leftTook the ones who genuinely cared and either drove them away or used them to fill whatever hollow space was screaming the loudest that week. They fell in love with turbulenceMistook intensity for depth. Confused obsession with devotionRomanticized the wrong things and called it passion And through all of it, every missed signal, every ruined connection, every good person they couldn’t let in, they told themselves the same story: “I love too deeplyI’m the one who always cares moreI’m the one who always gets left” It took a long time to admit that wasn’t the whole truth. _______________________________________ Here’s what I’m only beginning to understand about this person: They don’t really know what love isNot yet… Not because they’re incapable of itBut because somewhere along the way, their idea of love got tangled up with needWith validationWith the particular high that comes from being chosen by someone who makes you work for itThey learned to associate love with longing, with the chase, with the ache of almost and anything quieter than that didn’t register as real. So when love showed up gently, steadily, without drama, they got boredOr suspiciousOr they manufactured a reason to doubt it. And when love showed up as chaos, as push and pull, as someone who kept them guessing, they called it chemistryThey held on until it cost them and then wondered why they kept paying the same price. They don’t know how to receive loveSo how could they really give it? _______________________________________ I’ve been chasing storms for ten years Walking into them willingly, getting battered, and then standing in the wreckage pointing at the weather like it betrayed me Like I didn’t choose itLike I didn’t, on some level, keep returning to it because the storm felt more familiar than the calm ever did. There were people who loved me genuinely. I can see them now, looking back…their steady hands, their patience, the way they showed up without being asked. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of love. It didn’t match the picture I’d built from years of media and mythology and my own unexamined wounds. It had to look a certain wayFeel a certain wayHit a certain frequency of intensity or it didn’t count. I don’t even know when I decided thatI just know that by the time I noticed the pattern, I’d left a trail of missed connections behind me and a decade of emotional debt I didn’t know how to repay. I blamed everyoneThe ones who left, the ones who stayed too long, the ones who didn’t love me right, the ones who loved me and got nothing real in return. I built a whole identity around being the one who loved deepest and suffered most. It took me embarrassingly long to ask the question underneath all of it: “What if the person I needed to love first, was me?” Not the performative versionNot the bubble baths and affirmations version. Not “I love myself” said in a mirror with enough conviction to drown out the doubt. The real versionThe one that means sitting with yourself without fleeingChoosing your own peace over someone else’s chaos Recognizing when you’re using another person as an escape from yourself and having the integrity to stop Learning to be alone without immediately filling the silence with someone new, something dramatic, another distraction. The version that means admitting you’ve caused damage in places you blamed other people for the wreckage. I struggle to put myself first…I can move mountains for other people and barely lift a finger for myself. I can see someone else’s worth with startling clarity and be completely blind to my own. That’s not loveThat’s hunger wearing love’s clothes. _______________________________________ So here’s what I want to say, on a day the world dedicates to love: I’m not standing here healed and whole, ready to dispense wisdomI’m standing at the beginning of something I should have started a long time agoThe slow, uncomfortable, necessary work of learning to love myself. Not because I deserve it more than anyone else Not because I’ve earned itJust because I can’t keep doing thisI can’t keep walking into storms and calling it romanceCan’t keep testing people and calling it cautionI can’t keep hollowing myself out for everyone else and feeling surprised when there’s nothing left. I am broken in some places, I’ll say that plainly. But broken things can be repaired. And maybe the first step is simply this - turning around. Facing inward instead of outward. Asking not “who will love me” but What would it look like to love myself today, even just a little, even just enough to stop hurting both of us. _______________________________________ What if I never chased? What if I never looked for it out there? What if love was always the relationship I was avoiding, the one with myself and everything else was just a way of staying distracted from how uncomfortable that felt? I don’t know what that version of my life looks likeI’ve never lived it. But I think I’d like to find out. Happy Valentine’s Day to the last person I thought to love Me.

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