An Anniversary of it's Own

A full boat with no one I know. I am in a foreign country on foreign waters sitting with nothing but my thoughts as we head to reach the most crystal blue our eyes can devour, often known as paradise. It has taken me awhile to get here, not just the ninty minutes cruising on the rifts of the ocean, but to find a place where I am so happy to be alone without the need of someone to be my other half.

It feels cliché to write about falling in love with yourself. Because as most of us know its not a parallel line with no faults. We live for the serotonin boost that can classify us as happy, when in reality its all substantial and never long lasting.

However, I have dreamt of falling in love and being in love with someone since I was a child. A romantic vision originating from a button press Barbie book that told me what my future husband would look like, where he would work and what car he would drive.

My mind toxically claimed to the ideas, more than the follow through. When I eventually fell in love, the type to invest in but to never last; I lived out a curated story in my mind of built in tribulations and how every down built us to higher tomorrow. Every end was a season finale, and every beginning was a piece I was missing.

After my last relationship, I think that idea I had been chasing turned into needing to fill something to feel whole. As if each relationship took a part of my heart and left with it. This has been a consistent catch and release with only a few months in between. Always looking to fill instead of searching for a more fulfilling substance.

This time, I did it! I starved my cravings, I searched for a love that goes beyond another individual. Or rather I didnt search for it at all, it found me when I wasnt even looking. I've seen the girl who doesnt need someone elses love to feel wanted and loved.

I was sitting on this high speed boat realizing that its almost the end of Febuary. I mentioned to this girl I met on my travels how my last relatioship was in January. I just processed, its been a year of actively choosing to be by myself.

It truly feels like a "knowing what I know now" presentation. Yet this realization, has my heart pounding with more pride then any other one year anniversery has ever meant.

Maybe its the follow through of when my Mom told me that when I came back from solo traveling I will be a completely different person. Maybe its the new destination full of distractions and not the monotony of daily life; but at the beginning of this journey, I remember thinking, I want to be able to sit with myself, sit with my thoughts and be a person who can go for a stroll wherever they are and be fully present.

I no longer feel the urge to sit in the destination of distraction. I no longer feel the need to be loved to feel loveable by another person. This is not me claiming to be above desiring partnership or having a partner someday, it means for the first time in what feels like forever, I am no longer searching. I am no longer desiring to find this perfect person that fits in a life that I cant create without them.

I am still in love with the idea of love and in my profession, the capturing of all the small authentic moments that make love as powerful as it can be. And I am definitely still a romantic, but I have reclaimed the pieces of my heart that were once taken.

I am now in pocession of all of the parts that make me, me again! I am no longer branded by my past partners with the stretch marks left in their wake. I feel whole on my own, I feel inspired by my own dreams again, I feel the love for the ones that have chosen to stay in my life to a new precedent.

Like I said before, I know this overpowering self love montage is not parallel, that it ebbs and flows with the decisions and moves I make in my day to day life; however, I have seen a girl in me that has been missing inside for the last ten years. Her reflection has thickened with sun exposure and creased with time, but its a girl who knows who she is, and an inner love that doesnt waiver over the needs of another. Its been over one year of choosing to re-discovery the parts of myself away from another, and I cant think a more personal and beautiful anniversary than this!