I Still Want to Be Loved

After everything, I still want to be loved.

Sometimes that feels like a difficult thing to admit.

Because when you’ve experienced abuse, love becomes complicated.

You can want someone to hold you and still tense when they get too close.

You can crave reassurance and then question whether you can trust it.

You can want someone to choose you and still find yourself waiting for the moment they change their mind.

You can desperately want healthy love while having absolutely no idea what healthy love is supposed to feel like.

Because trauma doesn’t stay neatly inside the relationship where it happened.

It follows you out.

It shows up in the way you overanalyze someone’s tone.

The way silence makes your stomach drop.

The way you immediately assume you’ve done something wrong.

The way you rehearse what you’re going to say because you’re afraid of how someone might react.

The way you apologize before you’ve even figured out whether you did anything wrong.

The way kindness can sometimes make you suspicious instead of comfortable.

And I hate that.

I hate that someone else’s choices changed the way my body understands love.

I hate that part of healing means unlearning things I never should have had to learn in the first place.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life believing love is something I have to earn by being easier to deal with.

I don’t want to make myself smaller so someone will stay.

I don’t want to confuse being needed with being loved.

I don’t want to beg for communication, consistency, affection, honesty, or basic kindness and then convince myself I’m asking for too much.

I want to be loved properly.

Not perfectly.

Properly.

I want a love where disagreement doesn’t become punishment.

Where vulnerability isn’t collected and used against me later.

Where I don’t have to monitor someone’s mood to know whether I’m safe.

Where “I love you” isn’t followed by behavior that makes me question my worth.

I want gentleness.

Consistency.

Accountability.

Safety.

I want to know what it feels like to be loved without constantly preparing myself to be hurt.

And maybe the hardest part is admitting that I still believe that kind of love exists.

Because abuse could have made me bitter.

It could have convinced me that closeness isn’t worth the risk.

And there are certainly days when building walls feels safer than letting anyone near me again.

But underneath all of that fear is still a woman who wants to love and be loved.

She’s just learning that love shouldn’t require her to abandon herself.

So before I ever worry about finding love again, I’m learning something else first:

I am allowed to have boundaries and still be loving.

I am allowed to walk away from what hurts me.

I am allowed to expect respect.

I am allowed to trust slowly.

And I am allowed to want something different from what I’ve known.

The fact that I was loved poorly does not mean I have to accept poor love forever.

Maybe someday, being loved won’t feel like something I have to survive.

Maybe it will simply feel safe.

Until then, I’m learning not to settle just because loneliness gets loud.

I’m learning that wanting to be loved doesn’t mean I have to accept whatever calls itself love.

And I’m learning that healing isn’t teaching my heart not to need anyone.

It’s teaching my heart that it never has to lose itself to be loved again.

Still healing.

Still hopeful.