It's a wild life

I don't really have triggers. It's been one hell of a year and after this, I usually feel like I can handle anything that comes my way, with the help of a very big God.

But the word "needy." You took it too far.

"Needy" takes me back three years' time, to being seventeen and crying my eyes out every night, wondering about my self-worth because the one I trusted turned around and told me that I was too emotional, too needy, too clingy, that I acted irrationally, that I asked too much, that I was too much.

"Needy" takes me back to the very first time that I was broken. When you're seventeen and feeling everything for the first time, everything is magnified—the highs, the lows; the feeling of being on top of the world, spinning around in the kind of wonder only first times bring—felt as deeply as the hurt when he turns around and tells me that he never loved me—in fact, that he hates me. It's a cliché, but when you're seventeen and fearless, you believe you're in love, even though seventeen-year-olds (and twenty-year-olds) don't know anything about love at all.

"Needy" takes me back to 4 AM conversations with heavy hearts and a lot of missed phone calls; to fights that started at midnight and lasted until we could no longer stay up and we were so exhausted and broken and frustrated with each other that there was nothing left to say. And I would see him the day after those fights, and he couldn't even look me in the eye. And seventeen-year-old me believed that it was because I asked too much.

"Needy" takes me back to a toxic friendship that I thought I wanted in my life, except I had no idea who I was actually dealing with, and the supposed friendship was what I now recognize to be emotional abuse. Friends don't tell each other that they're worthless; that they're dragging each other down; acting like an idiot, useless, not worth talking to, not worth respecting—and now I can't believe that I ever believed any word of it. But seventeen-year-old me didn't know better.

"Needy" takes me back to my biggest mistake; to the first time that I was vulnerable and honest and open-hearted, and how it burned me and twisted my views on relationships for the next two years; how I went on to spend a year and a half in a relationship where I was forever afraid of feeling too much because I was so terrified of being the girl with too many emotions; too many problems and way too many feelings.

You asked why To Write Love on Her Arms matters to me. It matters to me because I know that my story is not unique, and that my pain is echoed by girls all around the world who have been hurt; who have been told that their emotions are too much; that their existence is too much; that they should shut up and stop feeling so much, or else they will never be loved.

But now I know that there's a God who created us for better things, and that we're all here because people need other people.

You could have never known. And you'll probably never read this, but on the crazy chance that you do, you need to know that your words matter, because your words hurt.

we never go out of style

i want to spend the coldest night 

dancing to the sound of deafening heartbeats

amongst glittery lights + strangers' laughter

with the most wonderfully reckless people 

and the most perfectly flawed boy

i could see us doing that again 

in this lifetime

oh, valentine