TAYLOR SNELL
Work Experience
Love is one of few things that will always be a part of your life, no matter how you incorporate it, or the kind of love it may be.
It can be stronger than anything else if you just give yourself time to understand it. I will discuss some past experiences, the good and the bad. And with those experiences, how I taught myself and keep teaching myself what is right and what is wrong, the knowledge I now have toward love, and what I deserve.
As a child I believed that love would be easy. I assume most children have this belief. Being told many stories like magical fairytales numbed my mind to believe that love was this dreamland. I saw many of those stories as short previews of the love I would one day have. I would find one person and we would run off into the sunset and do everything with each other for the remainder of our lives. Just like in the fairytales. That idea of love didn't stick with me too long. I remember being quite choked up when I realized how unrealistic my idea from my early childhood was.
Love had completely lost its spark for me by the time I hit my ten year mark. I began believing that love is also a tragic tale, not just a fairytale. I saw no true meaning or structure in love anymore, mainly because of the roller coaster relationships in my life at the time. I wondered why these couples bombarded one another with hurtful words or actions. Why did they say “I love you?” These people would come to show so much more hate then love toward each other. They seemed bored, and unsatisfied with what their relationship had become. So the only thing left for them to do was to scream at each other about what they wanted. But rarely did they take those things into consideration. Nothing ever got resolved. I tried to help salvage these people who were so lost. I could tell they felt the same as I did about love. For quite some time they were hopeless. After a while I just gave up. I couldn't change their minds or actions. In the story books people never fall out of love, only in it. It broke my heart I never thought my life would be converted into a war zone, just because of two people falling out of love. By the time I was thirteen I had lost a lot of myself because of this.
I knew love existed, because I'd seen it, but was ripped away from me when I needed it the most. I also knew that it is a fragile thing. You need to handle every conversation, every movement with care in order for it to be a lasting healthy love.
With years past and having relationships of my own, I now feel confident saying I'm on track to a very well deserved loving life. Over my seventeen years I've been put to the test for multiple things.
Love has been one of my biggest obstacles, my reason for that being, because with love comes forgiveness, trust and honesty. Many people in my life have been at times unforgivable, or untrustworthy and they lacked honesty, which made them hard to love. I have also had a hard time loving myself because of certain things such as verbal and psychological abuse which resulted to bad self-esteem.
I amaze myself.
Because I have come such a long way since love was first really introduced to me. I am now loving toward myself and all people, even the ones who have hurt me the most.
Now I believe that love is something every person is capable of, no matter their age, looks, status, or their background.
Everyone deserves it.
We all need it as though it is a basic necessity of life. People should be able to love whoever their heart desires.
Love freely, take chances, go for people you may have not even considered in the past, and most of all be realistic when it comes to love.
I'm in love and I don't plan on walking away from it anytime soon.
I will end this column with a quote: The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them. — Thomas Merton