Where Love Heals

I think I was born to love.

I know—it sounds a little cliché. But it is the truest thing I know about myself.

I have always loved with a kind of ferocity—an unmeasured, unguarded kind of love. The kind that doesn’t hold back, that doesn’t wait to be asked, that arrives whole and open, without armor. I have spent much of my life hoping to be met in that same depth, that same fullness. But more often than not, what has come back to me has been partial—fragments, reflections, echoes of what I offered so freely.

And strangely, I’ve learned to be okay with that.

There is a quiet understanding I carry now, one that has settled gently rather than broken me: I may never be someone’s once-in-a-lifetime person. No one may ever search a crowded room, land on my face, and feel that overwhelming certainty—that quiet, sacred relief of “there you are.” I have been loved, yes. But the kind of love that reshapes you, that roots itself deep within your soul and changes the way you exist in the world—that love has always brushed past me, close enough to feel, but never close enough to stay.

I have come close. Achingly close.

But it seems that the moment I become fully human—when I am no longer effortless, when my edges show, when my flaws rise to the surface, or when something brighter, newer, easier appears—I am gently set aside. Folded into something small. Left behind, like yesterday’s newspaper—once held, now forgotten.

For a long time, I thought the answer was to change. To edit myself into something easier to keep. Softer in the places that felt too sharp. Smaller in the spaces where I took up too much room. Simpler. More convenient. More… lovable.

But somewhere along the way, I realized something I had been missing all along:

My imperfections are not evidence of my unworthiness. They are evidence of my existence.

I am not unfinished. I am not lacking.

I am simply someone who loves deeply—living in a world that does not always know how to receive that kind of love.

And maybe that doesn’t make me too much.

Maybe it makes me rare.

JMS