If you fall in love with me

If you fall in love with me I can’t promise you it will be pretty. I can’t tell you I’ll make you breakfast on lazy Sunday’s. I can’t pretend that I won’t love you too much some days and not be able to even love myself others, when you wake up you may find me in a pool of my own tears or you may not find me at all.

If you fall in love with me, I won’t fall too fast, too hard, or endlessly, I have tried to love like that before and the results were nothing short of tragic. If you fall in love with me, I won’t change myself for you. I won’t give up parts of myself to make us work. I won’t plan a future with you that doesn’t include all of the things I want to do and be. My feelings for you will grow and change as they are supposed to and I will only be able to hope yours do the same.

If you fall in love with me I will show you how independent women love others. I will show you off to my friends. I will encourage you every day and help you achieve every goal that you are working towards, there is nothing more attractive than a partner with aspirations the same size as mine.

If you fall in love with me, I will share my interests with you and will hope you do the same. I will hold your hand in and kiss you goodnight. I will listen to your favorite song even if I hate it. I will try to hug you often. I will tell you my secrets and listen to yours, you will only have memories of the girl with every defense strong and steady.

If you fall in love with me, I will not be your everything. I will not tell you lies. I will not say that it will never end because I know it more than likely will. I will not beg you to stay if you no longer want to. I will not fight for us if you are not fighting for us. It does not matter how deeply or truly you love me I know when things must end.


If you are brave enough to fall in love with me I will try not destroy you.

When a writer falls in love

When a writer falls in love, her writings can either make you fall or will break your heart. When a writer falls in love, she may actually stop writing.

Ideas about love, relationships and heartaches are reality to some but for the writer, it is only but a dream she has yet to experience. For she is the writer who only learns about dates, kisses and break ups through the stories she heard. And when she writes, she tries to sew it all in the most perfect way. In ways like how movies and songs are made, with happy endings. She can only imagine.

Behind every chic flick, novels and songs are writers who works hard in portraying the emotions and feelings that people have felt- a feeling that she have not even experienced at all. She writes stories about her parents unconditional love or her friend’s break up but she has never written her own. It is an ironic event where one tries to make everyone feel something that she herself have not yet felt.

But then she fell in love and she stopped writing. She did not only stop writing, she stopped doing everything. She spent less time with her family, with her friends, with her studies and even to herself because she only had time for them.

Late nights out, dinner for two, movie nights, warm hugs and deep conversations. The writer fell in love with the simplest thought that she can also be loved. That she is capable of being loved, that she can be seen as a potential lover and no longer just the friend, the younger sister or the storyteller. The writer has become a reality of her own.

When the writer fell in love, she loved so hopelessly and very deeply. The writer who wrote fictional characters and imagined episodes became human. She became an actuality of her own, with someone whom she thought can only be found in her dreams. She was not conceptualizing drafts for others anymore- for she was making her own.

Of all the stories the writer has made, she always questioned as to how can people be so senseless when it comes to love. How can people become so helpless when they are in the state of being in love?

The writer sees it all now. One can not have a single definition of love, for love is universal. For love is experienced in different ways and in different levels. For the writer, she has accepted the fact that when you fall in love, you are not yourself anymore. You are a person blinded of love.

The writer no longer thought about herself but instead the welfare of her love. She no longer had time to write for she would rather look at reality- for this is real and words are not. The writer no longer writes because she’s afraid that if she would let even a minute pass, her reality might disappear.

And true enough, like the ones she have heard and seen, there will come a time when everything will fall apart. It was all gone as fast as it came. They disappeared leaving her breathless and perverse.

No more late night conversations, no more dinner out, no more ridiculous doings- no more them. There is no happy endings unlike what the other writers made everyone, including her, believe.

When the writer fell in love, she was sure that what she gave was pure and genuine feelings. But because there is no better expert of heartbreaks than a writer, she knows that she will no longer love the same. She knows how to restrict herself now for she already recognizes the feeling of falling back first and not looking if there’s even someone who’d catch her.

When the writer falls in love again, she’ll no longer expect pixie dusts, exciting glows and firework shows. When the writer falls in love, she’ll expect both an eternity of happiness and pain all at the same time.

When does love happen?

Is love the result of the first night spent in the same bed? Or maybe that night is a result of the love. Perhaps it happens the first time you meet their parents – maybe you fall in love with them first, sort of as a prerequisite to falling in love with the one you’re really with.

I guess one could argue that it happens all at once, in one moment. That maybe you go to bed after a night of binge watching Doctor Who and wake up the next morning completely overwhelmed with this feeling. And there was no exchange of words or sex or cupcakes to explain this sudden, extreme change of heart. Maybe it was just a really good night’s rest. Maybe it happens during your late-night Doctor Who session. When their eyes are glued to the screen with their mouth open slightly and they reach to grab a handful of popcorn, and it takes three tries until their hand finally finds the bowl and not your pant leg. Maybe this is the moment that the lightning strikes.

Maybe there is no lightning, but a steady flow of sunbeams that have always been present. Maybe there are only triggers, and that overwhelming feeling, that panic attack-esque feeling of being in love for the first time, is really us just realizing we’ve been in love all along. Maybe there is no one moment we fall in love, or we just don’t feel it anyway, but we feel the moment that we realize we’ve been feeling the way we have because we’re in love.

I tend to believe that love is similar to grief, and happens in stages without our knowledge. And it happens at different paces for different people – for some it may only take a few days, for some, weeks or months, in some rare cases it may even take years.

Maybe the stages are the same as grief; maybe in the beginning we are in total and complete denial that we are in love, and we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Maybe it’s denial because this feeling is too great, and this person really knows how to tell a story, and they clean up too nice, and their hair is too perfect, and they’re too kind to others, and they work out too much, and they are asking you too many questions about your job, and your major, and your feelings, and your mother, and your passions for you to actually be in love with, let alone for them to actually be in love with you.

Maybe by the end, we do really learn acceptance – maybe in the sense that we accept them for the little things; leaving the volume on the TV a little too high, the occasional hair on the soap bar, the fact that they don’t wait until the commercials to start telling you about their day, and by the time the commercials do come on, the story is over, it was anti-climactic, and now you have no idea who opened up the scoring in the game and the period is almost over and you know they'll talk through intermission so you won't be able to see what you missed.

But maybe we learn acceptance on an even deeper level. Maybe they’re not the ones we really need to accept. Yeah, they do clean up nice. But that tie wasn’t straight when he first put it on. Sure, their hair is flawless. But before you left the house, he had one strand sticking straight up and you think you’re dating Alfalfa. And maybe they are a really captivating storyteller. But it’s charming the way you take a year to tell a story, needing to tell every detail, stuttering and tripping over words, getting so animated, and ultimately forgetting where you’re even going with it, and by the time you get to the end, you’ve either lost everyone or they’re completely underwhelmed and it wasn’t really worth the effort it took to tell, or listen to. Maybe he can run a 5K and barely break a sweat, but I can sit in a coffee shop and write a novel about his kiss when he walks in the door from his run.

So maybe love doesn’t happen the first time you wake next to each other, or when you admit to them how old you were when you got lost on the way home from school and rode in a cop car to get home when you were in the first grade, or when they finally have your friends’ stamp of approval, or when your father tells them over dinner how you wanted to be a mermaid when you were younger and you cried when you realized you couldn't, but when we finally accept about ourselves the things we try so hard to force upon others to accept. When we’re finally in love with ourselves – that’s when love happens.

Depression is a journey and you can make it through

There’s no quick fix to depression. You won’t wake up one day feeling weightless. You will remove stones from your chest one day at a time.

It’s a slow process and some days you’ll feel just as heavy as months before. But one day you will wake up ready to face the day. It won’t be a perfect day but you’ll find yourself overcoming the gloom much easier.

It won’t rule your life anymore. You will sense it coming but it will leave just as fast. You will feel the darkness but the light will be there, too. You will hear yourself laugh when something is genuinely funny. It will be an unfamiliar sound but soon it will become recognizable again.

You’ll catch yourself smiling and it will reach all the way to your eyes. You will sleep through the night and wake up feeling well rested. You will go hang out with your friends or family and not make an excuse as to why you can’t make it.

Slowly you will begin to feel like your old self. You’ll have more energy. You’ll revisit your old hobbies and discover new ones.

People will tell you that you look different. You will think to yourself that you feel lighter. You lost the weight of the broken relationship. You lost the weight of the death of your friend.

You carry pieces of this time with you but it won’t pull you into the hole any longer. You will no longer feel as if you’re drowning.

You can finally breathe.

You will become worried that this newfound feeling is fleeting. But I assure you that it isn’t.

You have made it. You have found a way. You found the light.

It won’t always be easy to hold onto but you know it’s here. The light will never truly leave you.

Some days will seem dark but you will hold onto the flicker of light and it will persevere.

It’s only after you feel as if you’ve lost everything that you’re finally able to free yourself. 

Anxiety is a writer’s ailment

The process of personification aids catharsis; it makes palpable the otherwise abstract, sharpens the blurred grooves of consciousness into focused, delineated rows ready for observation and intricate deconstruction. It takes the otherwise non-human or illusory and gives it signs of life with the God-like audacity of the imagination, transforming everyday encounters, both unique and mundane, into moments of worth. Noteworthy. Book-worthy. Mental-delicacy consumption inviting.

A writer is, in effect, taking part in an imaginative degustation. But after the 10th course, the inevitable happens: you become overfull, slightly sickened with yourself, and begin experiencing the first pangs of regret. You realize you never savoured the flavor of the moment that you’ll never have again. You have a reconstruction of how you’ve idealized the entrée, with only a shard of original perception. Stuck somewhere in your cerebrum, bleeding out with the intolerable pain of not knowing if you’ll ever really find what you were looking for, but never found, in your memory…

To that effect, we’re all writers-some of us just choose to take on a passive role. The active ones, however, become skilled in personifying the unordinary to inconceivable heights, until anxiety becomes a host of unhealthy persons in your life.

Often it resembles the overbearing and toxic boyfriend, limiting your comfort with personal expression and growth. Magnifying mishaps into irreversible, catastrophic failures. Reminding you that you are NOT good enough; forcing you to question the weight of your worth at the cost of cheap metals, instead of gold.

Write when you feel stupid. Write when you think your idea is cliché. Write when you are embarrassed to place the words on paper. Write on despite the grammar and punctuation errors. WRITE. WRITE. WRITE.

It becomes the unattached lover, that doesn’t really want you. The one that leads you to stand in front of the mirror and feel a slight, growing disgust with yourself. A repulsion by the touch of your own fingertips against your skin, for want of a type of coarseness to reflect the callous you feel for yourself.

Sometimes, your anxiety is akin to a loner’s only friend. The one that concedes that you are everything awful and then some, but that that’s okay. That you’ll always have each other, and you’ll find your own way.

When you’re feeling better, it’s just a dishonest neighbor, which most of the time you ignore, and other times you reiterate the clear boundaries between your properties. This is my consciousness, my happiness, my existence, my framework within which I function, prosper and grow, if even with setbacks at several junctions, and then there’s yours. You can’t fathom its existence beyond the vision of it and its unsmug, but vain, face. It’s somewhere in the fabric of the being you perceive, but only from afar.

Other times anxiety is a dancer, mockingly swaying in both the shadows and the light. A ballerina that moves with distractingly exquisite grace, leaving a slowly-developing destructive trace where she has twirled around. Dancing to a timeless melody granting calm and serenity, divulged to none. Never tiring, never sinking, swaying, moving, breathing in a lightness you can never hope to achieve.

And sometimes anxiety is exactly what you think it is-a problem that isn’t really there. You know it’s a non-issue; you can pinpoint the moment you decided to personify it to something you are fully aware it is not. But you are a writer, and you have given life-not a murderer. And sometimes that anxiety, in whatever form it has taken on, simply needs to die a natural death.