The Gift of Unrequited Love
Throughout my life, I have been the poster boy for unrequited love. It seems that I developed an impossibly gargantuan crush on a new girl every two weeks or so throughout my schooling years, but I was so afraid of the possibility of them not liking me back that my crushes just ended up crushing my heart as I hid my true feelings and made sure no one else would be able to feel them with me.
When Sophie, a beautiful angel whom I instantly fell in love with in sixth grade, giggled mockingly after I made the social faux-pas of talking about my boogers and everyone at the table laughed at me, I wanted to crawl into a glass bottle and throw myself into the Pacific. When Stephanie, whom I found utterly captivating and unattainable, wrote 2 terse sentences in my yearbook, my heart fluttered like a flock of doves. When I got the call from Megan and she told me “thanks for the birthday card, but I’m really not interested in having a boyfriend right now,” I choked on bitter tears in my bedroom and rapidly devolved into the absolute worst version of myself. When it became abundantly clear that Catherine was not in the slightest bit interested in being with me after timidly and awkwardly pursuing her for months, it stung me like angry wasps. And even as recently as two days ago, when I told Rosanna that I found her to be rather beautiful after contemplating her Hinge profile and she has been silent ever since, there’s a little boy in my heart that says “why does no one love me?”
And I am here to tell you that all of these experiences of rejection, disappointment, heartbreak, broken fantasies, disillusionment, and crushing pain (and there are many, many more) were the keys that unlocked the door beyond which the true beloved dwells. And that beloved is the very being that I am now. All of these crushes that I have had crushed me into the sacred remembrance of who has the power to love me as no one else can. And that one is me.
The whole game of unrequited love that I played was an innocent misunderstanding of how reality works. I believed that the absence of love that I noticed within myself would be fulfilled by the presence of love from another, when the cosmic joke was that I was the one who needed to love me, and no one else could do the job completely. Of course it is wonderful to be loved by another, and I welcome that experience whenever it arises. But to compulsively seek and need the love of another as a requirement for happiness is to be chained to the shackles of self-deprivation.
So, from the bottom of my heart, to every human being I have loved who has not loved me back in the way that I wanted them to: thank you. Thank you for destroying the imaginary cage I placed myself in by projecting the power of my own love onto you. Thank you for showing me how out of touch I was with the power of my own love. Thank you for showing me how terribly I treated myself when I didn’t get what I wanted from you. And thank you for participating in the ultimate heist, where all illusions were robbed from me so that I could know the truth of who I am: pure, loving presence, dwelling in human form. All is forgiven, for it turns out that nothing that happened was an event in need of forgiveness. Everything that hurt was gently, sometimes fiercely, leading me back to the beauty and grace of love that I am, the love that I am able to provide myself now. And may these words be that for you, whenever you happen to be on the journey back to yourself.
May you taste, know, and embody the unique frequency of love that you always are.