25

 

There’s a quiet kind of grief in recognizing that many of the places where you searched for love were never capable of giving you what you were offering. But there’s also something freeing about it. It means that the tenderness, loyalty, devotion, patience, and depth you spent years looking for were never absent from your life. They were living inside you all along.

I wrote this for me :

I kept looking for proof that I was lovable in the way others held me.

Then I looked at my own hands.

The hands that stayed.

The hands that built.

The hands that forgave.

The hands that reached out again and again despite disappointment.

And I realized:

I am not the love I received.

I am the love I gave.

The danger, though, is to stop at the first half of that realization.

Yes, the purest love you may have received came from yourself. But that doesn’t mean you are destined to only love and never be loved well. It doesn’t mean your standards were impossible or that deep connection is a fantasy. It only means that many of the people you met were unable to meet you where you stood.

Tomorrow is my birthday. A strange thing happens with birthdays: they make us count what we lost, but they also reveal what survived.And you have survived a lot.

The dreamer survived.

The writer survived.

The girl who still wants the sky survived.

So,

after twenty-five years of searching for love in the wrong places, I finally found the one person who never left.

Me.

And perhaps that is the greatest gift this year has given me:

the certainty that I have always been worthy of the love I was searching for.

Happy birthday, Waad.