I do not know how to have needs and be loved and heard and not watch people walk away by scaring them.

I do not know how to balance that ability to be a human with needs and a human who gives without being seen.

I do not know how to balance being a human who cares but a human who also needs care, or a human who loves but a human who also needs to be loved. I am currently assembling myself, rearranging myself as I evolve through this beautiful, chaotic journey of life.

I have been viewed for so long and projected on, but I have not been seen. I have been told how I should be perceived and how I should perceive myself. However, I haven’t been acknowledged for the who I am and who I am becoming. But I am learning that all starts with me.

I do not know how to do this yet, but I do know that I am on the journey that most makes me come alive. The journey of figuring it out and owning my true responsibility of how I respond to everything.

I have felt love in my life, but I want to feel the love that makes me feel seen not for what I look like but who I am. I want to feel love that sees me not for my body, my skin, or the lines on my face but my soul yearning to dance with another without the stigmas and untruths holding me back.

I am learning that to feel that love I must see myself first that way. Maybe life isn’t about becoming but stripping back the layers and baring it all so you can see what has always been waiting for you and was always there. Maybe love isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass but dancing in the rain and rising from the smoldering ashes not as whole but broken and rebuilding through the lessons learned and the unseen we need to acknowledge in the discomfort.

Maybe life is not about stopping to look for the answers through a world that does not know you, has never had another you, and people who have never lived your life, and instead be about you looking for the responses that make you most feel alive, seen, and able to handle all life throws at you.

One of the things I have learned through my experiences with emotional and physical abuse is that it makes you see to the depths of your soul—what you have allowed, and what that has in turn created you to be, and what has been left unseen (where therein lies the answers).

I have learnt pain becomes comfort, and it is about moving out of that comfort and moving into the discomfort of being seen and loved that really is what we are seeking. However, because the world makes love like the fairy tales, it is hard for us to trust the discomforts of being seen and loved.

I feel in life every one of us is hoping that someone will help us, so we do not help ourselves, and the more we walk and encounter life, the more people we meet and the harder it becomes to help the one person who needs to help us to change our lives—ourselves.

We have to take the front row seat to our lives and we need to be in the arena to live it. We must stop being the bystanders of our change—hoping, wishing, dreaming; thinking of the “could haves,” “would haves,” “should haves”; thinking some else will have the answers; or focusing on our excuses and regrets—and take true responsibility in life.

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