Courage

It takes courage to love. It takes courage to face your fears. It takes courage to change. It takes courage to resist changing the things we have no control over. It takes courage to accept our limitations and to embrace our talents.

It takes courage to see the flaws in ourselves and to love ourselves in spite of it. And yet even more courage to change them. It takes courage to take ourselves on. It takes courage to see what our loved ones see. To listen to what they are telling us and then to see it in ourselves. And it takes courage to pay attention to it all, but also to trust that it is for our own good.

It is scary and terrifying and lonely to face ourselves. It feels like we are the only ones in the world that feel the way we do because we don’t know why we feel the way we do. Why we do what we do.

It takes courage to be alone. And it takes courage to be with someone. It takes courage to risk and courage to have faith. It takes courage to step out of our skin, to move away from our self imposed safety blankets and venture further out of ourselves.

The world can seem so scary, cold and lonely. We all need someone. But it takes courage to realize and know that we can’t get through it all alone. We need each other and it takes strength and courage to accept this because it’s so hard to trust. Harder than we realize until we are truly tested.

It is so hard to trust ourselves, how could we easily trust another?

It takes courage to see this. To believe this. To accept this.

We say we don’t want to be alone, but when we realize what it takes to be with someone else, we lose our courage. We become so afraid of so many, many things. Fear of losing them, fear of being hurt, fear of things that have nothing to do with them, but with our pasts. Being with them forces our pasts to rise to the surface. It takes so much courage to stay with someone. The right someone.

If you have the courage, you will let them show you what you don’t want to see, whether they mean to or not. If we are alone, there is no one to show us anything we do not want to see. It takes courage to acknowledge this and keep moving forward. One step at a time.

It takes courage to let someone in and to let them see us. But it takes even more courage to see ourselves. For me, this is the hardest. To see myself for who I am, good and bad, to not feel sorry for myself, and to reach deep down inside of myself and find the strength to change.

It takes courage to love unselfishly, to not constantly fear that someone will take us from ourselves. It takes courage to create a line between the “me” and “we”. It is a constant struggle. It easier to get lost in someone else so that we do not have to deal with ourselves. And it is easier to keep someone at arm’s length so we don’t have to see ourselves.

But we are not meant to go through life alone. We are meant to love and be loved. We are meant to grow and to help others grow as well. It is only through others that we can connect to the world around us and to ourselves. It is others that show us who we are and help us become who we want to be. So we have to reach out, venture out, and take the leap. Because if we don’t, we do not change, we do not grow. We remain stagnate. We become closed off. We don’t give of ourselves. We don’t share ourselves.

We receive less and less in life because we give less of ourselves. And suddenly we see ourselves in the same place over and over again. We miss the gifts that life offers us because we are so focused on NOT letting things out. We are locked down. We want to protect ourselves. We are all so scared. But it will not prevent us from pain and sadness and change. We will experience it all regardless. It’s the one thing we can be sure of. The one thing we have no control over. But we do have control over balancing out our lives with joy and love.

And this, this takes the most courage of all.