Blood Drenched Towel to Victory

It's a fragile circle, some things in life. Or at least I occasionally feel like I get myself trapped in this circle — going round and round, trying to break free and create some abstract figure, but my mind and heart just take me back around the same old path. Of course, I do not think my entire life has just been a giant circle, just certain aspects, decisions, feeling and actions.

I am a rather different person in comparison to who I was even just a year ago, yet I find myself struggling not to make some of the same mistakes I made before. Most rational people might see these situations and say it’s possible this time it won’t come out like a circle — that it might not ultimately end in my bleeding wounded heart.

But take a heart that has been stabbed over and over, and it begins to remember what caused those wounds and to avoid getting itself into that situation again. A woman with the heart of a little girl can only be wounded a certain number of times before she throws in the blood-drenched towel and calls it quits. She stops trying to find something that doesn’t need cleaning up. In fact, she stops searching at all. She’s been fooled into thinking she found perfection one too many a time, only to love and not be loved in return, or to have that love abused. And I don't know what is worse.

I don’t want to give up, but I don’t want to be hurt again either. Can I handle it again, so soon? What happened to the optimism I still withhold about all other aspects of my life? Why can’t I shine that light of optimism into this sector of my world? Because this is the part of my world where I have always had the highest expectations, and those expectations have been more than just unfulfilled, they have been lowered and lowered until I basically feel like maybe I do not deserve anything. I know that’s not true, but put your heart through the works like I’ve done to mine — throw your heart at anyone pretending to be interested and watch them laugh, and that’s what you begin to feel like.

I have prayed about these things and changed some things in my life, and I do know my heart has healed from these old wounds. It is a full-functioning heart capable of loving without holding back, but it cannot help but remember the old wounds when entering a new situation where the possibility of pain is inevitable.

I want it. But I don't at all. I don’t because I do not know the outcome, and I have somewhat lost hope in positive outcomes in matters of the heart — at least for me. But perhaps it’s not what I think. Not everything and everyone are here to hurt me. And not everyone or everything has hurt me in the past.

I want to learn to love again without holding back. I want to be fearless. I want to once again believe that the trial is worth the pain, because where there is possibility for failure, there is also possibility for success and beauty. And out of failure always comes a lesson learned and an opportunity to grow — so was it even really failure? Then what am I waiting for? Someone else to do all the work, I suppose.

I cannot be invested in any outcomes in anything in my life. I just have to live one day to the next and know that I am not in control and never will be. And if I do not get invested in an outcome, then that still leaves hope for a happy ending, but helps to guard my fragile and sensitive heart. I’m not as tough as I sometimes like to pretend, and I'm finally ok with that.