Midnight Writer

No. That’s the immediate answer I tell myself every time I even entertain the question of whether I’m ready for a real relationship. It’s not a gentle no, not one that leaves room for possibility. It’s firm. It’s heavy. It’s rooted in something far deeper than hesitation. As much as I’d love to convince myself that the answer could someday be yes, the truth inside me always pushes back harder. I am not ready for a committed relationship. I am not ready to hand someone my heart when I can barely hold it together myself. I am not ready to show love to another person when I can’t consistently show love to me. And if I can’t figure out how to love myself, then how in the world could I show someone else a genuine love without hurting them deeply? It’s easier, so much easier, to believe I’m unlovable than to risk being proven right.

Every day, I look in the mirror and feel a wave of resentment toward the person staring back at me. Not because he’s a bad person. Not because he’s done something unforgivable. But because I don’t recognize him the way I used to. Because I see flaws first. Because I’ve spent years training my eyes to look for everything that’s wrong instead of anything that’s good. That person in the mirror isn’t someone I think is ready to love or even ready to be loved. On the surface, he seems charismatic and cheerful, someone with humor, with presence, with a personality that lights up a room. But when you peel all of that away, what’s underneath is a mix of loneliness, doubt, fear, and an arsenal of self-deprecating thoughts sharpened over time.

Those thoughts didn’t appear suddenly. They didn’t explode into existence in a single moment. They grew slowly, quietly, over years of insecurity, trauma, comparison, disappointment, and silence. I can’t point to the exact moment I started feeling this heavy distance from myself. I can’t say it happened at sixteen or twenty-one or twenty-seven. It feels more like erosion, like little pieces of self-worth slowly breaking off until one day I woke up and realized I wasn’t looking at myself anymore, just the damaged version I had grown accustomed to believing in.

I come from a very broken family, and that kind of upbringing leaves imprints that don’t just wash away when you turn eighteen. They follow you. They grow with you. They shape the way you interpret the world, the way you attach to people, the way you value yourself. Growing up in an unstable home teaches you how to survive, how to be alert, how to adjust quickly, how to read people’s moods before they speak, but it doesn’t teach you how to receive love. It doesn’t teach you how to trust consistency. It doesn’t teach you that affection doesn’t always come with conditions.

When love is unpredictable in childhood, you learn to distrust it in adulthood. You learn to flinch. To pull back. To sabotage connections before they have the chance to break you. You learn to assume people leave. You learn to expect disappointment. You learn how to navigate chaos but not how to accept peace.

And when that becomes your default setting, it shapes everything, including how you see yourself. It convinces you that you’re the problem. That you’re the common denominator. That you’re the reason the past went wrong. So you walk into new situations believing you’re already at a disadvantage. You believe you have to earn love, prove yourself, outperform your flaws. You believe that any softness you are given is temporary. You believe people will love you only until they get close enough to see the parts of you you’ve been hiding.

That’s what happens when your worth is built on unstable ground, you spend years trying to remember how to stand, and even longer trying to convince yourself you deserve to.

People love to say, “You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you,” like it’s a simple, universal truth. Like it’s easy. Like it’s just a decision you wake up and make one day. They don’t tell you how complicated that really is. They don’t tell you that learning to love yourself feels like you are having to delete a piece of coding in your DNA. They don’t tell you it might take years before you can speak kindly to yourself without it feeling forced. They don’t tell you that healing is a process that has setbacks, relapses, regressions, and days where you’re convinced you’ve made no progress at all.

They don’t tell you how difficult it is to unlearn self-blame. How hard it is to separate your identity from your insecurities. How exhausting it is to fight the internal voice that has been narrating your life for so long that its lies feel like facts.

Loving yourself isn’t a finish line. It’s not an accomplishment you unlock after completing a checklist of affirmations and therapy worksheets. Loving yourself is the work. It’s daily. It’s uncomfortable. It’s choosing honesty over denial. It’s catching yourself mid-thought and asking, “Would I say this to someone I love?” It’s sitting with the pain you used to numb. It’s forgiving yourself for things you’ve carried for too long. It’s letting go of old versions of yourself that kept you alive when love was absent but are now holding you back.

For most of my life, I believed I needed to fully fix myself before I could let someone in. I thought love required perfection. I thought I had to arrive whole. I thought I had to eliminate every insecurity before I deserved a relationship. And because perfection was impossible, I convinced myself that so was love.

But slowly, very slowly, I’m starting to realize something: you don’t need to be perfect to be loved. You don’t need to be completely healed. You don’t need to be confident all the time. You don’t need to be fearless. You just need to be willing. Willing to grow. Willing to communicate. Willing to show up even when it’s uncomfortable. Willing to let yourself be seen, not just admired.

The truth is, you don’t heal in isolation. You heal in connection. Yes, you need a foundation of self-love but you also need people who know how to be there for you. People who remind you of your worth when your voice is too shaky to say it yourself. People who don’t run when your insecurities show up. People who don’t punish you for being human. People who choose you on your loud days and your quiet days. People who see the version of you beneath the insecurity and love that person just as much.

I’m still learning to believe that I deserve those people. I’m still learning to believe that I don’t have to earn love by being perfect. I’m still learning to believe that my past doesn’t disqualify me from a future. I’m still learning to replace the voice in my head with something gentler, something truer.

So am I ready for love? Maybe not today. Maybe not in the way I want to be. But I’m learning that “ready” doesn’t mean flawless. It doesn’t mean fearless. It doesn’t mean fully healed. Ready means open. Ready means honest. Ready means aware. Ready means willing to grow with someone, not for someone.

I’m not there yet, but I’m closer than I’ve ever been. I’m closer to understanding my worth. I’m closer to speaking to myself with compassion instead of criticism. I’m closer to admitting that maybe I am deserving of something good. Maybe I am capable of being loved deeply. Maybe not in the future, maybe even now, in this messy, imperfect, still-healing state.

And maybe the real work isn’t preparing myself to be loved.
Maybe the real work is learning to stop running from it when it finally finds me.

–Midnight Writer

“Love doesn’t wait until perfection, it meets you were you are.”