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Loved Anyway !!!
If you’ve ever caught yourself, at any point in your life wondering-
“Would anyone still love me… if I wasn’t trying so hard?”
Or perhaps…
“Would they still accept me, still include me, still want me,if I stopped performing, stopped pleasing, stopped pretending?”
Then this- this is for you my dear reader.
If you ever wondered what would happen if you dropped the mask. If you let the tears come instead of swallowing them back. If you stopped being agreeable just to keep the peace and simply existed- messy, emotional, real.
Would love survive that version of you?
The one who is silent some days, sharp-edged on others.
The one whose softness hides beneath a strong act, whose truth is sometimes tangled, unsure or hard to hold?
If that question has ever lived quietly in your chest,
then let these words be your answer-
The world taught us early how to shine in ways that please. How to perform belonging. How to keep the room comfortable, even when we are falling apart inside.
But let me tell you something, not as advice, not as poetry, but as something that has lived in my heart-
The deepest kind of love, the rare, life-altering kind- is not the one that arrives when you’re at your best. It’s the one that stays when you’re not easy to be around. When your wounds are loud. When your walls are high. When your past walks into the room before you do and your self-doubt clings to every word you speak. It’s not love that demands you to be “better” before it offers warmth. It doesn’t turn away. It doesn’t bargain. It just stays. And when you taste that kind of love, even once, it changes you.
Not because it flatters you. But because it frees you.
You begin to unclench. To exhale. To believe, maybe for the first time, that you are not too much or too little. You are simply, deeply, heartbreakingly human. You stop shrinking to be accepted. You stop editing your soul to fit a frame that was never meant for you. Instead, you start standing tall in your flawed, magnificent skin and whisper-
Here I am. All of me. And I am loved.
That is the beginning of a homecoming. Not to someone else’s arms, but to your own heart.
Because being loved anyway, when the seams show, when the mascara runs, when the silence stretches, when your anger erupts like a storm, is where the sacred truly lives. It’s not the kind of love that wants something from you. It’s the kind that holds you when you have nothing left to give.
It’s the text that says- I’m here, even when you canceled again. It’s the hand that reaches for yours not when you’re glowing, but when you’re gasping. It’s someone sitting beside you in your storm- not trying to fix it, not handing you sunshine, just choosing not to leave.
And maybe, if we’re lucky, we taste this love not only from others,but from ourselves. Maybe we start to become the ones who stay. With our own hearts. With our mess. With our tired bodies and beautiful scars. And in that staying, with a gaze that holds instead of fixes, we begin to unlearn every version of ourselves we thought we had to become.
We are loved.
Still.
Not because of what we bring.
But because we exist.
And in that tender truth, the heart finally comes home…~ Latika Teotia
