The Courage to be loved: Ch 1

Chapter 1: Finding Love in the Ruins

1.1 — How Love Finds You in Your Lowest State

Love does not arrive when your hair is neat, your bank account full, or your heart fully mended. It does not wait for the moment you feel presentable or proud of the person you’ve become. It comes when you are weary from trying. When you are barely holding your life together. When your eyes are dull from wanting something you no longer believe is possible.

It comes like water reaching cracked earth — not to make it prettier, but to remind it how to be soft again.

Love finds you in your ruin because ruin is honest. Because what has broken open in you has created space for something unexpected. Your carefully built defenses — the ones designed to ensure you will never hurt like that again — sometimes split at the seams. And in the silent ache that follows, love walks in — not asking for explanation, not demanding decorum, not requiring you to rise or impress — but simply seeing you.

Not the version you've auditioned. Not the perfect future you assumed you'd need to inhabit before being worthy of something real. But you. Stripped. Frayed. Still here.

Love finds you there because that is the place without pretense. That is where truth is raw. And truth is where love knows how to root.

You were not ready. You did not think you deserved it. You hadn’t even remembered how to want it.

And yet, love came.

We think love is something to be earned through accomplishment, through beauty, through self-improvement, through being someone others would want. But love — real love — is entirely disinterested in your résumé. It sees the parts of you that were never listed. The parts that sag when you're alone. The parts that ache with quiet grief. The parts you believed made you unfit to be chosen.

It is in the lowest state that love feels truest — because there's nothing left to hide behind. No illusion to maintain. No performance to sustain. It is a strange relief to be seen without the armor. To feel someone choose you without your practiced glory, without the future you’ve been promising yourself you’ll become someday.

That’s how love finds you: in the wreckage of what you thought you needed to be, stepping quietly toward the truest version of who you actually are.

And this is the invitation:

Let love see you where you are. Let love touch you while you're still shaking. Let love arrive before you feel worthy of its arrival.

Not because you are ready — but because you are real. And real is all love has ever asked for.

There is a strange brutality in believing you are unworthy of love — not because love itself is cruel, but because the belief slowly rewires your sense of what is possible. It teaches you to apologize for your own existence. To make excuses for why someone should stay. To lower your eyes when someone looks at you with softness, because you’re terrified they’re about to see what you see: someone incomplete, someone not yet enough, someone still in the process of desperately trying to earn their own right to breathe.

But here’s what you learn, in the most daring moments of honesty:

There is no version of you that will ever be “complete” by the standards of the wounds that shaped you.

Those wounds will always ask you to delay your lovability — “just one more achievement,” “just one more healed part,” “just one more year of trying,” before you consider yourself allowed to be loved.

Love interrupts all that.

It isn’t a reward. It doesn’t arrive with a checklist. It doesn’t care if you haven’t been to therapy, or if you still feel broken, or if you’ve made mistakes you don’t know how to forgive yourself for yet. It doesn’t demand that you change in order to earn it — though, paradoxically, its presence begins to change you anyway.

Real love knows how to sit next to the wreckage without trying to rebuild it in an hour. It doesn’t flinch at your shadows. It doesn’t run from your unhealed parts or your unfinished chapters. It can hold the shattered places before they’re pretty. It believes you before you believe yourself.

Love sees the debris — and as if it had always known, it pulls up a chair and calls it a home.

And that’s where the awakening begins:

Not when someone picks up your pieces and puts them back perfectly.

But when someone lets your pieces be exactly as they are — and stays anyway.

Because love doesn’t fix you.

It remembers you.

It remembers who you were before you forgot your worth.

It remembers the softness you cut away to survive.

It remembers the dream you buried when the world told you to grow up and be realistic.

It remembers the one who still opens their heart, even after it bled.

It remembers the one who still hopes, even after it hurts.

It remembers your soul, not your symptoms.

And it calls you back to yourself through the radical possibility of being loved before you’ve proven anything.

Which is why love often feels so disorienting when you’re in your lowest state: Because it is not reflecting your damage — it is reflecting your truth.

Real love speaks to the person you are beyond the bruises.

It sees what is eternal in you — even while you are drowning in what is temporary.

And so the invitation becomes more courageous than ever before:

To allow love not into your perfect life — but into your broken one.

To receive love not as a prize for becoming who you think you should be — but as a remembrance of who you already are.

Love doesn’t wait for your permission to love you. It only waits for your surrender — the moment you stop trying to perform worthiness and simply breathe into the relief that you don’t have to.

This is where healing begins — not from the mind outward, but from the heart inward.

You didn’t have to be ready.

You only had to be real.

1.2 — The Silent Ways Love Already Lives in You

We spend so much time waiting for love to arrive from outside of us — a person, a moment, a gesture, a confession, a miracle — that we forget the most astonishing truth of all:

Love is not something you will one day receive. It is something you have quietly been made of.

Before anyone ever reached toward you, love was already there — pulsing through the subtle folds of your being, not as a feeling, not as a relationship, but as a state of existence. The seed of your life did not sprout from lovelessness. Life began in warmth, in gathering, in breath, in pulse.

But we forget.

Not because love leaves us — but because we learn to ignore its quieter expressions.

We grow up under the false belief that love is measured through external validation: how much someone wants us, needs us, sees us, chooses us. We believe it only matters when it is spoken, displayed, dramatized, made visible and loud and shared.

But love is not always loud.

Some of its most powerful forms make almost no sound at all.

Love is in the way you held yourself together on the days you wanted to collapse but didn’t.

Love is in the meals you fed yourself when no one else was there to take care of you.

Love is the silence you offered your own suffering when there were no words.

It is the simple act of waking up again after nights you thought would break you.

It is the part of you that still dreams — even if it dreams quietly now.

It is the part of you that searches for meaning even when nothing makes sense. The one that still hopes, still notices small beauties, still pauses for sunsets, still feels the pulse of something deep inside you that says “not yet” to giving up.

These are not small things.

They are love.

And they are already yours.

Because love is not only something you give or get — love is the organizing intelligence of your being. It is the energy that holds your cells together after heartbreak. It is the unseen hand that guides you toward warmth even when you think you prefer isolation. It is the force that refuses to let you get numb forever — no matter how hard you try.

You are made of love, deeply and anatomically. Your nervous system was wired for connection. Your heartbeat synchronizes when you’re near someone you trust. Your skin longs to be held not out of weakness, but out of biological memory. You were built for love the way lungs were built for air.

And so, when you say you do not know how to receive love — what you are really saying is that you have not remembered what already lives within you.

Love is your baseline. It is the quiet awareness watching all your longing — not judging, not pushing, not shrinking — just holding the ache as though it knows what it means to be here longer than you do.

It is the softness that returns after every breakdown.

It is the forgiveness that bubbles up after years of bitterness.

It is the unkillable tenderness you thought was gone — but keeps reappearing, no matter how deeply you bury it.

This is the love that lives in you. Not because you earned it, but because you are it.

And the real journey, then, is not toward love — but back into it. Back into alignment with what has been silently speaking through you all along.

When you start to notice the ways love already exists within you — in your breath, in your body, in your capacity to feel deeply — you stop imagining love as something unattainable, or far away, or reserved only for the “worthy.”

You begin to see that love is the fabric of your being.

That love didn’t leave.

You simply stopped recognizing its voice.

And that recognition — that quiet, radical remembering — is what begins to open you to receive love from others. Not out of desperation. Not out of emptiness. But from a place of truth, fullness, and deep inner resonance.

You cannot receive love truly until you know you are not separate from its source.

You don’t need to become lovable to receive love.

You only need to remember that you already are.

There is a love in you that doesn’t announce itself.

It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t demand. It doesn’t need to be proven or praised.

It is the soft-rooted love that simply is.

It lives in the quiet strength you’ve shown at the edge of collapse. In the way you keep showing up to life even when it doesn’t return the favor. In the way your heart still knows how to ache — which means it still knows how to feel.

That ache you’ve mistaken for emptiness? That is love, echoing in the chambers you’ve forgotten how to enter.

When you think you don’t love yourself, what you really mean is you don’t feel at ease with yourself. Notice, even in that — there is care. There is yearning. There is a longing for peace. There is a desire for home.

That longing is love calling you inward.

Because love is not only an emotion — it is architecture. It builds. It remembers. It brings things back to where they belong.

There is a way your lungs inhale breath without your permission — that is love keeping you alive. There is a way your wounds close without you needing to understand the mechanism — that is love repairing you in silence. There is a way your mind keeps searching for meaning even after disappointment — that is love refusing to leave you lost.

Your body continues to forgive you every day simply by functioning — by waking, by holding you upright, by healing microscopic injuries you never noticed.

It’s not waiting for your gratitude — only your awareness.

Because the more you notice these quiet, consistent forms of love in you, the more the noise of unworthiness begins to dissolve.

You don’t need to convince love to enter your life. You need to relearn how to recognize its language.

Love sometimes speaks like this:

• A sudden softness in your chest when you see someone smile.

• The way you speak more gently to a child or an animal than you do to yourself.

• The moment your eyes tear up for a stranger.

• The unspoken wish that others won’t suffer the same way you have.

These are not signs of weakness — they are proof of your aliveness. Proof that life is still reaching through you, even when you don’t feel worthy of it.

You think love is the romantic confession, the grand gesture, the emotional swelling that makes everything make sense.

But love is also the hand that wipes your face in the dark, alone, without witnesses. Love is the part of you that keeps telling the truth, even when it costs you comfort. Love is the voice that says, "Please don’t give up," when your mind says everything else would be easier.

Love is the presence in you that never stopped believing in you — even when you stopped believing in yourself.

And because that love is already here, breathing alongside your breath, there is one truth you cannot escape:

You are not waiting for love to show up. You are learning to let love be seen.

Seen through you. Seen for you. Seen as you.

And the moment you begin to actually feel — in your bones — that love has never been absent, something miraculous happens:

You stop tolerating what wounds you and you begin choosing what nourishes you.

Not because you finally earned love, but because you remembered you never had to.

We wait for love to arrive from outside us—a hand, a voice, a home, a confession—but the deepest truth of it is this: love was never absent. It has always lived in the chambers of your being, not as a gift to be earned, but as a quiet fact of your existence.

Even in your most hollowed-out hours, love beats inside you as the pulse beneath despair. It’s present in the breath that finds you in the dark. It’s there in the part of you that refused to completely turn numb, even when that felt easier. You have mistaken survival for emptiness, but even that—especially that—is its own exhausted form of love. There is a love that sustains you even when you’ve abandoned yourself.

It might not feel like love when your hands tremble at the thought of being seen. It might not feel like love when you cry quietly in the bathroom after holding everything together for one more day. But somewhere in you is a will that still rises, a longing that still aches, a softness that refuses to fully die. That is love.

Love is not always triumphant. Sometimes it arrives in a whisper, a shudder, a half-lifted head. Sometimes it's simply the decision to stay alive one more day, even when you don’t know how.

There is love in the way your chest opens when you hear truth spoken gently. There is love in the eyes that tear up at a stranger’s kindness. There is love in the part of you that is still moved by music, or by a memory, or by a tenderness you thought you no longer had access to.

There is love in how your heart still thinks of others, even when you’re hurting. How you still find the courage to trust again, despite all the proof you’ve gathered that it isn’t safe. How you still—somehow—reach for meaning, or softness, or connection, even though it keeps breaking you.

Maybe this is the greatest proof that love already lives in you: the longing itself. The longing to be known. The longing to be touched gently. The longing to rest inside something that will not leave. Longing is love reaching toward itself.

It is not the absence of love that hurts most—it is the belief that you are separate from it.

You are not separate.

You are not starved of love. You are learning how to recognize it in its quieter forms.

Your body is made of devotion. It knits bone to bone even in grief. It closes wounds you cannot see. It breathes even when your thoughts go silent. You do not command these things; they simply happen. That is love’s intelligence—alive inside your cells.

There is no story of brokenness that could erase the fact of your being made from love. Even your pain is evidence of that truth. If you were not love, you would not feel its absence so deeply.

You do not need to create love, or perform for love, or hunt for love like a treasure hidden beneath the world. You need only to remember who you already are: a vessel of soft persistence, carried by the same current that urges flowers to open and tides to return.

The day you stop searching for love outside what you are, you will see it everywhere.

In the eyes of someone who stays. In the breath that keeps you rooted in your body. In the memory that rises unexpectedly and softens your chest. In the quiet strength that has brought you all the way here.

You have not been abandoned.

You have only forgotten the language of your own heart. But it has never forgotten you.