Waiting for someone to choose you is like waiting for an unplugged alarm clock to go off or a burnt-out neon sign to start flashing.

Neither one ever lights up and all your time spent waiting, waiting, waiting for the sign to come through means you’ve already missed the real sign in the first place.

Wanting to see a “yes” and instead receiving a blatant and direct “no” is never easy. It rubs up and bumps into our sensitive heart’s desires and our ego’s projection of how those desires are to be met.

We are living in false time. A fabricated existence and timeline of our own making that never comes to fruition—because we have given our power away. Given it away to others to decide for us. To decide if we finally will get what we want. If we will finally be met with love instead of rejection and abandonment.

It’s a power game we are playing with ourselves, and the external world is just mirroring this handing over of our power back to us. It doesn’t mean we should try harder to flip the “no” upside down and somehow make the letters spell “yes,” with our contorting and subtle manipulation tactics. No, this is not from a stance of power but distrust in who we are to attract what we are fully and wholly worthy of.

Love and relations are the breeding ground to show us where our unmet wounds are, yes, and where we have refused to claim our own power. When we feel powerless and allow another to decide for us if they want to love us, to be with us, to see us fully, to choose us, that’s when we know—we are not believing in our own power. We are not trusting in our own power. We are perceiving lack and limitation. And, our emotions, our individual stories, do nothing more than reaffirm and solidify this disempowerment structure.

It’s a lose-lose-lose situation. And we always find a way to lose even if we could be winning. Even if in the rejection and closing of doors, we are actually being deeply guided and initiated back into our sovereignty and power. No, that’s not the easy work.

The easier work is to respond and react to life and others as the source of our wounding. To remain in the volatile emotional abyss of self-rejection and self-abandonment, further reaffirmed by the other. To remain in a position of victim, “life-is-out-to-get-me,” and to feel as if the universe is laughing and mocking you for your brazen attempts to open your heart time and time again to others, despite not knowing if they are worthy of receiving your vulnerability.

When we are rejected by another, we may feel as if our vulnerability is our curse. That us putting our heart on the line yet again was the reason we got burned yet again. But, maybe, maybe, our courage in showing our heart is not our flaw. Maybe we are learning how to be brave and also give our heart back to ourselves with more grace and less self-punishment or condemnation.

If someone isn’t ready or open to receive our heart, then we must do the inner work to know that this is not personal. It is the truth, and if we can begin the process of acceptance of all that we feel in relation to this, then we can begin to heal. We can begin to see the self with the eyes of great compassion. To know how deeply we desire to be met. To know that we still hold this unworthiness chain around our own heart. To know that perhaps this self-bondage is what is preventing us from receiving what we truly want and desire.

Our own feeling of unworthiness of love will always attract this externally. But, maybe it’s not a problem to be fixed—but a human to be loved. Even more in our perceived lacking and fault-finding ways—because we never needed to be perfect in order to be loved. That perfection is a prison and a chamber of lost secrets bent on making us suffer and succumb to pain over and over again.

Waiting for someone to choose us instead of us grabbing our own hand, reaching our arms around our own hearts, and saying to ourselves, “I love your beautiful, soft, tender heart, and there is nothing wrong with reaching for that same tenderness in another” is like waiting for a text message to come through on a dead phone battery.

Maybe, maybe, at some point, someone will plug the phone back into the power source. And, maybe, they’ll remember to message us back. But, also, us waiting in anticipation of another to choose for us always leaves us feeling empty, powerless, and without.

So, maybe the choice is between waiting for an eternity for the possibility of a morsel of love, or choosing instead to stay open to the potential of infinite possibility that the universe has for us, not bent on one fixed and limited option. That, maybe, the ego and emotions can hurt, and maybe, we did nothing wrong to bring about the similar storyline, but that maybe, we can begin to choose differently. To stay open with our beautiful, sensitive, feeling hearts. To hold our hearts with the utmost love and tenderness for their resilience and willingness to open. To not make ourselves wrong. To look at the self with kind eyes and say, “I see you. I see your bravery. I see your heart of gold. I see your worthiness even if you don’t just yet or still.”

Choosing the self is the bravest act of all. We choose to love ourselves so fiercely in the face of perceived rejection as a way to reclaim our power. That we are powerful enough not to have egoic power over another but to have power in and of ourselves to accept and embrace our hearts as they feel their way through this life and relationships.

Power is in keeping an open heart to ourselves, to our own love, to the love of the universe, to our hearts in being met with love and rewiring our emotional patterning to believe in this reciprocity of love to nourish and nurture us.

Nurture the sensitivities, the vulnerabilities, the ooey-gooey spots that feel just a little tender and raw. They need our love the most.

In giving that love to ourselves, we become what we already are: power embodied, love in moving, flowing form.

Heart-to-heart, open to our own love wanting to flood in, we stand not as rejected, not as cast out into the cold, but brought in to a deeper loving of our own hearts if we so choose it, if we choose ourselves.

I dare you to choose yourself.