Know Yourself

Love is a remarkable thing. I have loved people and places before but never with all of myself. I have witnessed deep love but never partaken of the bitter sweet waters.

I avoided the plunge because I am a self-interested personality. Let me calirfy; although I am driven to aid others, I am limited by my vast and consuming sense of self-preservation.

I took the unthinking leap about four years and six months ago. I fell in love knowing the other wasn’t in love with me. I, vain and careful, who made certain a man adored me before agreeing to dinner, I fell madly in love and never looked back. He was beautiful and he became my whole world in one moment.

I was more terrified that a car would smash him then I was that he might not love me in return. I was ready to tear heads off over wounds inflicted YEARS before I had ever met him.

I found that although you may be angry with the one you love, you will still love. I learned that I worry and fuss even when I do not like him. When I am happy, the heat inside burns and I feel the mark deeper every day.

And as friends lose their own loved ones, the fearful knowledge that I too will lose someday, haunts me long into the night.

I am here to report to you that my verdict is this; Love will make you vulnerable and strong. I have been moved to a pain I would not trade and fallen to my knees in gratitude for it.

You will be able to accept the choices of the one you love even when jealously and anger cry out “Injustice!” You pay for that acceptance because you will hurt with the one you love, you will sympathize even when reason says you ought not to. You will find out that you are a smaller and bigger person then you thought you could be.

If I could offer any advice from my short experience it would be this: Know yourself, as much as possible, before you meet this One. Then get to know yourself even better. I tell you this because you will offer and sacrifice yourself on the altar of your Love. There, as the fires burn away the pretty parts, the ugly parts will cry out, exposed and aching, in the charred ashes. If you are unsure of your weaknesses and strengths, you may be the undoing of what you desire most. But if you know yourself to the best of your ability, you may heal yourself and elevate what you have into a painfully tender friendship. You and your love may create between you that which is written in legends and songs throughout history.