Hurt Yourself

Heartbreak is probably one the greatest enigmas of humanity: we do everything in our power to avoid the pain, yet our actions of avoidance steer us directly into heartbreak. A few days ago I had a thought about a recent love lost: “What if the walls we built to protect ourselves from harm were the very walls that kept us from the love that would protect and nourish us?” Less complicated: love is what protects us, not walls, tests, and distance. To many of us love is a binary code we plug and play in various situations to create outcomes that match expectations we do not understand. Our love, though, is only as powerful as our connection to ourselves. We cannot produce love greater than our internal love for ourselves: if your love for yourself is toxic or anemic, your love for others will be toxic or anemic. Through connection with our inner self, we learn how to love more fully. This should be taught in our most formative years as children, but the generations that have raised today’s adults spent their childhood surviving great global turmoil: all they knew was survival, all they could teach their children was survival. And so, here, this next generation sits —with great abundance and great choice: do we continue as the generation in survival mode or evolve?

I believe the best way to love, especially if you are still healing and growing, is by finding people who want to support you. A telephone pole supports the telephone wires, it does not ask them to be anything more or anything less. That is the tragedy of this poem: two people coming together with different views of themselves and goals for the relationship and it ends in pain. The last stanza can be read from either perspective and represents the dual nature of reality.

You said to me:
We shouldn’t get together.
You said to me:
I hurt people. 

I said to you:
I am responsible for my choices. 
I said to you:
Let's heal together.  

You had no words,
We were no more. 
You hurt yourself,
More deeply than you could ever hurt me.