Simply being human is the hardest thing to endure at times. We are so complex, so layered and unpredictable. Our emotions are larger than we admit and capable of reaching depths we sometimes do not believe possible.

The mere truth that comes with humanity can leave you feeling overwhelmed. The truth that in life, everyone will hurt you, intentionally or not. The truth that you will fail; you will drown in loss, you will give your heart to the wrong people.

You will be tortured by the people you trusted most. You will make plans that will never work out and you will love only to ache when it's all over. There will be times you feel as if you're standing atop the tallest mountain, the happiest you've ever been, only to be blindsided by a storm that rips everything out from under your feet.

Being human goes hand in hand with being broken. You will never live a life of only love and laughter and passion. You will hate, you will fall and you will struggle in ways you never saw coming. And we all mourn that painful truth.

But to break over life is a beautiful thing. In breaking we grow. We get stronger, more appreciative and if we are lucky, we become softer and more sensitive to the small blessings life hands to us in the middle of all of its chaos. Agony shows us how alive we truly are, and how deeply we can feel both the good and the bad.

The common response to being broken is building walls. We build walls around the parts of our hearts that have been wounded the most, in efforts to guard those areas from more pain; a sort of safehouse, if you will. Yet in all that effort to guard our wounds, we cease the opportunity to let them be healed. The world works both ways.

There is pain, but there is also love. Every time you hurt, you eventually heal. But no one wants to believe that. We all want to hold onto our pain, to guard it deep within us to remind ourselves that we can in fact hurt, and no, it is not okay to live and embrace our strongest emotions and greatest gifts, because by God, the world may hurt us again.

People become so afraid of being reckless with their hearts that they fail to realize the only reckless thing to do with your heart is to protect it from all the wonderful things it was meant for. To hide it from people and experiences and emotion, in fear of the inevitable heartbreaks we will each endure over the course of our lives.

There is nothing to gain in being guarded. You aren't keeping pain out, you're trapping it in.

Hurt needs to be released back into the world before it can be replaced by wholeness. Our experiences are meant to make us stronger, to help us make better decisions, make us smarter and more appreciative of the good. Our lives are meant to be filled with love and passion and people, ones that we chose because they fill the dark places of our hearts with light. Life is not meant to be lived crouched in a corner afraid of the odds of a certain outcome over another.

Don't lock the world out of your heart because you're afraid of being hurt. Hurt is inevitable because this is life and you are human. Life breaks your heart, whether you're prepared for it or not.

So give yourself the chance to feel as much good between the bad as you can. Don't keep yourself closed off to feeling all the beauty the world has to offer just because you're scared it won't last. Nothing lasts. Not even the brokeness you think you can hide from. So tear those walls down and let the world fill the spaces of those scars with all it has to offer. Stop resisting emotion, because if you can break, you can also heal.