Your heart quickens.

You can barely stand yourself, or your body, or anything in the room that confines you.

But, you can't help feeling that at any moment you will fall apart into a hopeless million pieces. So you curl yourself up tighter, becoming more claustrophobic, just to keep yourself together.

And then, it happens. The text arrives, or the phone rings and, it happens. They say they love you, too.

You sit there, stunned, your whole world paused, put in limbo or purgatory. You can't hear above the buzzing in your ears that is still leftover from your fear, and all of your limbs lose their feeling. Did they really just say they love you too? But, how? How could THEY love...you?

I'm sure you have felt this, thought these things. How is it that someone as beautiful as the person you care for could ever love you? Most of us, anyone who isn't stuck up, it seems, feels that it is better to feel we are not worthy of love returned, then it is to accept it and enjoy it. To enjoy the feeling returned to us, as I so often denied. But, why?

It is a simple question to a complicated action. We love someone; they love us back, we are baffled.

Is it because we are so used to being rejected? Perhaps, though most of us don't run into people, or search for them, often enough to be turned down so regularly that when we hear the words, "I love you" returned to us, our first thought is to throw the words into the trash can or pass them onto the next person in line for love, because they can't possibly be for us. But, we don't see how poisonous this belief is.

I understand that rejection tends to put one into a state of wondering which one of their faults scared their love away, or perhaps it was all of them, and they are just as terrible as their mother promised they weren't. And while these thoughts do come to each of us, in love and heartbreak, more often than not it has nothing to do with the way you are (though some people are truly deplorable human beings, they are the only ones who can change that, and it is best not to deal with them), as it has everything to do with the feeling of love in the other person simply being absent. They don't feel anything. It is no insult to you as a person, the feeling, simply isn't there. Many times, even, the lover becomes the friend, and two souls get along just fine without any romance to be seen in their friendly gestures.

So, why then do we bully ourselves into thinking we don't deserve to hear our love returned to us? Do we really think so little of ourselves? We wish for it, so why don't we accept it when it comes to us?

It is because we do not love ourselves enough. We do not care enough for yourselves to say that we are worthy of love, and if not kind enough, we are worthy of making ourselves better. We deserve to have a good life, so long as we are willing to give it to ourselves, to fight for it, and to make ourselves believe we can be truly beautiful: from within.

No one, no person, can grant you all the happiness in the world. Though your feeling for them may bring floods, absolute tsunamis of adoration, no one can grant you inner peace except for yourself. You must learn to care for the soul within the temple first, and then you can learn to choose love wisely, and accept it wholeheartedly when it arrives, giving love in return. To be whole and love, and to love in return. This is how the emotions last. This is how the love lasts. And this is how you accept love when God gives it to you.