Love

What is love? That's a question every love story asks.  What I'm interested in knowing is who am I when in love?  My first love, pictured here, brought out the best sides of me.  When I was 15 he taught me that I'm beautiful, he taught me that I deserve respect.  Not only was he the first boy to ever tell me that I'm beautiful, he was the first to make me FEEL beautiful. When I was with him, who I was seemed different, better.  Nothing can or ever will compare to that love.  I became in love with love, when I moved away from him I wanted that feeling back more than anything.

Since him I have loved many.  The people that I have loved have really effected who I am.  I have lived my life going from one love to the next, changing again and again.  I didn't care about figuring out who I was, all I wanted was to be the one for whoever it was I loved at that time.  Looking back, that was an awful habit.  Because now, now I'm 24 and less sure of who I am than ever before.

I never bothered having dreams of my own, I am a bandwagon dreamer. Whatever my "love" wanted for his future I wanted as well.  I wanted the same thing so badly that they became my dreams. Unfortunately that meant that when the love ended, so did those dreams, losing a love is hard enough, losing dreams was salt on the wound.

Here I am, without a "love," and without dreams.

A huge part of me doesn't want love, doesn't want dreams.  I just want to live on my own, raise my son, and that will be my life. But see, there I go doing it again, I'm sure you can see it already, my son's dreams will become mine.  I suppose it could be worse, I could be one of those parents who has such big dreams for their children that they prevent their children from ever trying for their own.

Amanda means lovable, fit to be loved...that seems to be a pattern as well. I feel like everyone I've loved has loved me more than I love them.  I don't have faith that it will last, so I guard myself, I don't allow myself to love like I did the first time. Unfortunately that's another thing my first "love" taught me, love can end.  I've heard so many times that if it ended then it never was love, I beg to differ, because there are men that I have loved, that I still love, that I'm not with because of logic...it wasn't logical to stay with them.  Often because I couldn't see myself succeeding with their dreams.

Now that I'm not riding the bandwagon of someone else's dream I suppose I should work on loving the one I'm stuck with for life...myself. I should work on becoming someone worth loving, not for a "him," but for me.

Here goes nothing.