If I ever question if I love my husband, I just have to look at the evidence.  How things he does or says frustrate me.  How hurt I get over the smallest of things (well, small to him, anyhow).  How terrified I am of losing him, or feel like I'm going to lose my mind if I am apart from him.

Because the evidence is all there.  It points to the fact that I love him.  Fiercely.  If I didn't love him, all the stupid fights we have, the frustration and hurt that I feel, well...it simply wouldn't be there.  If I didn't love him, those things wouldn't matter, they wouldn't bother me, and I would simply ignore it and continue on with my life.


Perhaps that's how you know you love someone.  You know that they are capable of so much more than they think or realize.  You see all their potential.  And you want to spur them towards being the best they can be.  So when they do things that you know are beneath them, things you know they're better than, it frustrates you.  You know...you KNOW...they can do better.  Be better.

If only.
If only.
If only.


For the past three-ish years, I have acknowledged that I do not know how to receive love.  I do not know how to accept it.  On the flip side, I also know that I do not know how to love.

And it has made me constantly question "do I love this person?  Am I capable of love?  Is this what love is?  Perhaps it's all just made up in my head, and I'm pretending to know something about something I know nothing about."

It feels like it's made up in my head.
It feels like I have no idea how to love, how to show love, how to give it, how to live it.


It didn't always used to be that way.  I remember when I was younger the aching I felt to just want to be known.  To be seen.  And I remember realising that even if I didn't feel that way, I wasn't about to let the people in my life feel that way.
I remember seeing myself as overflowing with love.  Having so much of it within me, but not being able to pour it out on people around me, for one reason or another.  Either from rejection, or preemptively not wanting to be rejected, from not wanting to come on as too strong or crazy, and whatever else there may have been.

So over the years, it became more difficult to give away.  It was still there - that love - wanting to just find sources to receive it.  But there were none.  And so, I think, it slowly dried up.  To have this big, overflowing well of love within me, and having no one to come drink from it, having people reject the source of the well...I guess it was only natural for it to dry up and cease to exist.

And now I'm here.  Constantly questioning if I'm tricking myself and those around me that I am capable of love.  That I know what love looks like.  That I know how to accept it.  That I know how to give it.


As stated at the beginning of this post, I guess I know it's there, to some extent, due to the constant hurt and frustration I feel.  Because that's evidence that I care.  But it still feels very...fake, I guess, to me.  Like I'm pretending to know what I'm doing when I actually don't.  I'm just some robot in disguise as a human, miming everything I see all the other humans do, in order to fit in and not stand out.  But really having no emotion attached to anything I'm doing.


I don't know.
I don't really know anything these days.
That is to say, I know my fuck-ups and my failures and how greatly I contribute to the misery of those around me, but apart from that, I don't know anything.

Such is life, I guess.