11.6.25 // I'm Not Hard to Love
I'm not hard to love.
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And I'm tired of believing that I am.
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The little girl who loves with her whole heart- boldly, brashly, sometimes audaciously- is not challenging to love.
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Maybe I've let others lead me to believe I'm hard to love because I am always the first to throw the stone at myself: the first to critique, the first to try and “fix” myself, the first to make myself small if someone is uncomfortable with my personality.
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That's not to say I'm for everyone. I'm not a laid-back love that slips casually into your life at the moment it's convenient for you to show up. "Insatiably curious" should tell you everything about my mindset, constantly growing, shifting, challenging my own being.
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If you aren’t growth-minded, you may end up resenting me for my evolving needs as I learn and fail and rise again. To some, that is exhausting. But to others, with communication and shared curiosity, we build friendships and relationships that expand us both.
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As I shift like the seasons, I am still the same girl at my core... built on love and kindness. Even now, I approach life with a kind of childlike curiosity to learn myself. That doesn’t make me less confident in who I am... because my core remains. The surface simply moves. I am still the ocean, no matter how the tides shift.
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But I wonder if I believed I was hard to love because it wasn’t really me you loved. It was the idea of me, who you expected me and wanted me to be. And I wonder if I betrayed myself by trying to become that idea instead of fiercely protecting the boundaries of my own becoming.
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It’s an easy mistake, to build someone in your mind, to fall in love with the imagined version, to make promises to that person, without ever seeing the real one in front of you. And if your version of me was never real, why would your actions need to be?
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But I’m done abandoning the little girl inside me who is exquisite- her smile, her goofiness, her refusal to “grow up” into the quiet, contained, unbothered woman the world tells me to be. A woman without yearning, depth, emotion.
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She doesn’t want that and neither do I.
And if that makes me unlovable to you, that's a loss you can shoulder alone.
