I’ve had had people come and go from my life countless times throughout the years. Some were brief sun showers and some were full-blown hurricanes that seemed to never end. Some left aftermaths that won’t ever be completely erased. Some are remembered through memories, some through pictures, some through songs or places or smells. They were all remarkably different, but they all took something from me. Something I willingly handed to them, without them ever even asking for it.

They took all the love I mistook for mine. I was a happy-go-lucky child, one that laughed — really laughed, one that was outspoken, one that made everyone around her fuller, without taking away from herself. I think everyone starts out that way. But I started growing older, and I started realizing that maybe I wasn’t so amazing. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut — everyone else was outspoken too, why would anyone possibly care what I had to say? Maybe I wasn’t as important as everyone around me, maybe I wasn’t worth as much anymore.

So I started looking for my worth in other people. I wasn’t full on my own anymore, but my family and friends, and eventually a boy or two, filled me up. I wonder, now, if I ever took anything from anyone too. I wonder if someone, somewhere in the world, became emptier to make me whole. I hope not. But that’s how I survived—I existed because other people wanted me to, because other people loved me. But what was I when those people weren’t there anymore?

Poet R.M. Drake said, “Maybe we feel empty because we leave pieces of ourselves in everything we used to love.”

Over the years, I’d have a friend who I’d rely on for even just an ounce self-worth, and they’d leave. They’d move away, we’d drift apart, whatever it may have been.

I’d like a boy, we’d talk for a little while, I’d feel unbelievably happy, and things wouldn’t work out. Whoever it was, they always took something — something I desperately needed. Because every day I would try and fill myself up through others, and every time someone left, they took that with them and I was left empty again. The happiness I felt when they were there was never truly mine.

And that pain is incomparable. Because it’s impossible to keep any type of love if it doesn’t reside within you first, and it took me forever to learn that. I’m still learning.

If you have no love for yourself, within yourself, what makes you think you could possibly give love to anyone else? You can sure as hell try — but you simply just don’t have enough to give. If you don’t love yourself, the only love you ever have inside you is the love someone else gives you.

And that’s the only love you have to return.

And when you return it, you have nothing again. It’s so hard to do anything about this, because you’re so used to the cycle you’ve been going through your whole life. But we can work on this together.

We can’t ever get the same love we gave away back, and we’ll always remember the storms that left our hearts in destruction because we tried to do the impossible. But the good thing about love is that there’s an endless supply of it — even if we have to start from scratch and create it all on our own.

I've been growing, learning, and getting better at this, but it's not easy.

I can only hope to one day have so much love inside myself that I can love someone with my whole heart, without chipping anything away from it. I can only hope to one day be able to accept love from someone not because I need to, but because it makes me happy. And lastly, I can only hope that one day, when someone leaves, I’ll still be full, because I never needed anyone but me to make me whole in the first place.