I don’t think anyone planned on hardening their heart, it just sorta happened.
Trust died at some point. There was the last lie they told, the last lie you told yourself.
There was the last excuse you made for them, for yourself. There were a lot of lasts. The last time you shrank in order to fit into someone else’s box for you. The last time you silenced your voice because you knew it wasn’t going to be honored anyway. There was the last time you posed and postured. The last time you smiled. The last time you let them see you cry. The last time you let them see how much they hurt you. The last time your body convulsed and shook because you couldn’t hold the pain in any longer. And suddenly one day, it stopped.

A salve was poured over each aching wound. A cool breeze ran over all the hairs that stood on end. A hardness replaced the timid tenseness, how your shoulders tucked just below your ears from fear. Now your fists wadded into balls, your jaw set and your teeth gritted. The softness you felt for them, even when they hurt you, that understanding and pity you once felt was gone. It was never going to come back. That look of adoration that you once held for them was now replaced with a hardened glare. Oh, Hunny if looks could kill they’d be on the floor lifeless… and there’s a part of you, a very broken and hurt part of you that wouldn’t even dial 911.

That’s where the humanity left. I know, we were driven to that point. I know. I know it well. I stayed because I thought that’s what love did but it wasn’t. That was what my trauma did. That was what my traumatizers taught me to do and I did, again and again. Then my humanity drained right out of me and they became no one to me. They became nothing, just like the nothing they treated me like. And I justified it. I think we all do.

I know better to walk away now. I don’t like that woman, she’s cold and cruel and chocked full of rage, anger and pain. She’s callous. Rightfully so, in theory but she’s dangerous and I don’t like being her.

Now I have the self-respect to walk away before she shows up. Because once she arrives, I become starkly aware that I’ve swallowed too much of their pain and not expressed enough of my own and now I’ve become numb because it’s too much.

Just because someone treats us inhumanely doesn’t mean we can or should allow it to cause us to become inhumane. We can’t allow the cruelty of another to cause us to become the very same likeness that hurt us. It’s the same spirit, different expression. We can’t afford to keep passing the pain on to the next person. But we have to be self-aware in order to stop this epidemic. And it is an epidemic.

Every day on the internet I see people lumping entire genders into one category because of their past experiences, but what they fail to realize is that it will be what they think it will be. If you think all women are bitches, guess what!? You’re going to attract all the woman who will give you that very experience! It’s the law of cause and effect, Murphy’s law, law of attraction! Whatever you want to call it. Nothing changes if nothing changes and if you aren’t willing to change your perspective, you will not have a new experience. It really is this simple. It starts here.

We have the power to break the cycle. We can show up as the people we would want to be around. We can show up with integrity and love in our heart and anticipate that we will receive that in return. Truly expect that to show up and it will. It would defy Universal laws if it did not. It’s just like the law of gravity. You can disbelieve all you want but gravity is there and it’s gonna hold your ass to the ground. Go ahead and try to fight it.

Let us not embody the same energy that hurt us. We’re better than that. We can grow beyond that. Let us heal and choose differently and live better lives. Lives filled with love, joy and peace. Yes, let’s…

Blessings xx