Dear darling you,

It amazes me the type of grip first loves have. How easy it is to rethink every past decision the last four years. Life, love, loss, and with three simple words you find yourself right back to four years ago. Sitting in your first car with your first love, wishing it’d never end. Now, you find yourself dealing with disappointments after disappointments revisiting past flames for the sake of something familiar. And then, there are days that are great, you meet a guy and things are going so well, dangerously well and then you find yourself becoming attached, moving too quick, caring too much, and then…it falls apart and you’re back sitting in your bed crying about your first love at 2 am wondering how you got here. Life has a funny way of working out don’t you think? And when I say funny I mean utterly awful and terrible but still beautiful. Beautiful in such a way that the tears you cry at 2 am are turned into a metaphor of the beauty of heart break. But any self-respecting woman knows this to be false. Crying in your bed at 2 am over a boy who had your heart four years ago is not beautiful. Going after guys who you know are no good for you, because you need to feel a different type of pain other than him is not beautiful. Wishing you weren’t so head strong, so ambitious, so driven so men won’t be intimidated by your strength is not beautiful. But yet, here we are, sitting in our bed at 2 am crying, sobbing, over failed relationships, over past loves, over new loves and yet were told this is beauty.

Now, I will tell you what real beauty is. Real beauty is the look on your face when you ace that exam. Beauty is finding out one of your childhood friends is recently engaged. Beauty is that smile that beams when someone you love tells you how much you mean to them. Beauty is determination to be the best possible version of yourself. Beauty it not pain. And sometimes beauty is not always beautiful. We need to stop living a life that revolves around what is considered beautiful to everyone but ourselves. We need to stop mourning lives of people who are still living but living separately from us. We need to stop lowering our standards because we are so fearful we will forever be alone. We need to stop pouring water on our fire that is within us because some people aren’t always equipped to handle it. And lastly we need to stop believing that love will not find us.

There will always be that first love, the one you met when you were young and dumb. The one who you always felt would never compare to the rest. The one that we believed we would always hold a place in our heart for them because everyone told us that was the way it worked with first loves. But that is the funny thing about life. It almost never goes the way we hope it too.

So dear beautiful you, make 2 am your friend again. Make 2 am full of laughter from too much booze. Make 2 am, the time to write down your best ideas, to watch scary movies with friends and then hid under the covers when you’re too scared to sleep. Make 2 am when you clean your apartment and make it feel like home again. Nothing is ever set in stone. 2 am does not have to be the time when your life falls apart. 2 am can be great, because remember my dear, life goes on and time moves fast, stop spending your 2 am’s thinking about someone who never once deserved you. And, at the end of the day remember, you deserve someone like you.

Sincerely yours,

The much wiser you