Why are so many people afraid of love?  Why do so many people not know what it is or how to love properly?  Why have so many people been so hurt by love that they refuse to accept it or let it in?  Love is who we are.  Love is where we come from.  Love is where we will return when we die.  I know that it is not easy to love.  I have struggled with it.  I have given the best parts of me to people who did not know how to love me in return or accept the love that I offered.  I carried a lot of blame for that.

When love presented itself to me in its truest, purest form, I didn’t know how to accept it.  After all the talking I had done to myself about what I would do when the right type of love came along, I bombed at it spectacularly.  The lesson I learned from that failure, shaped the biggest journey I have ever taken in my life, which was to truly learn how to love myself, to fall in love with Chere Roshawn Hampton, something I had never done in my life.  I was always busy loving someone else, looking to care for someone else, doing any and everything to avoid me.  Learning to love myself has not been easy.  It has taken me by surprise at how foreign a concept it was.  I have learned a lot about myself on this journey.  I have learned to take myself out on dates.  I have learned how to spend time with myself and enjoy my own company.  I know that by doing this work, it will make me ready to receive love when it returns to me.  I will be ready to get it right.  More importantly, I will always have my own love if anyone else’s doesn’t measure up.  That’s the blessing in the lesson.

Instead of hopping from relationship to relationship, wondering why things never work, it’s good to take a step back and spend some time with yourself.  Heal your wounds.  Love on yourself for a while.  What is meant for you will come.  That may take some time.  It will serve a greater purpose for you in the end. You have to learn to love yourself and figure out what you want.  It will be some of the hardest work you will ever do in your life, but it is rewarding.  You discover the beauty in yourself.  Something that you have in you all along. You just have to pay attention.