How In Life, The 'Worst That Could Happen' Usually Isn't So Bad

The other day, I was getting coffee with a girlfriend, over-analyzing every aspect of my life (as per usual) when she cut me off and posed a question that I’d been avoiding the whole time:

What’s the worst that could happen?

Of course, this conversation involved a boy, and of course, I was doing my best to control every minuscule detail of the situation. My talking ceased and I looked at her blankly, with no intention to answer her absurd question.

Seriously, what’s the worst that’s going to happen? You’ll get your heart ripped out. You’ll shatter into pieces and you’ll feel every single broken piece and you’ll cry and it will hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt. What’s so bad about that?

I wish you could have seen the look on my face as I tried to process her words as they dove into my heart. None of it even made sense, yet it made so much sense at the same time.

What am I so scared of? Why do I feel the need to calculate my every move, analyze people’s intentions around me and approach this life so cautiously from afar?

Is avoiding a broken heart really worth missing out on weak knees and butterflies? Dancing alone in my room until the sun peaks over the horizon? Is avoiding a bad feeling worth forcing myself to feel nothing at all?

Life is messy. It’s about making mistakes and loving the wrong person and figuring out why we are here and chasing dreams and falling hard and skinning our knees and bleeding cold, red, dirty blood all over the sidewalk.

It’s about the moments of impact that help us to remember we’re alive. We are not here simply to exist. We are not here to play it safe and control those around us and make sure we double and triple check someone’s intentions before making decisions.

Life is about diving in, head first, without a clue about what lies below. It’s about loving hard and giving our all and having our hearts ripped wide open, giving us more room to allow someone new to climb inside. The more broken you are, the more spaces people seem to fit.

Life is about love: falling, giving, failing, rising. Life is about learning that love is a single word with a thousand meanings. It’s about falling in love with yourself first and everyone else in the world second.

It’s about finding something to love about every single person you encounter, every situation you face and every lesson you must learn.

It’s about true love, toxic love, broken love, passionate love and wrong love. It’s about same love and different love and realizing that at the end of the day, love is still love.

If, at the end of the day, all you can say is that you gave love your all, got your heart broken a few times and maybe even broke a few hearts yourself, you’re doing pretty darn well.

If you spend your days loving and being loved, falling in love with yourself over and over again, and learning the many meanings of the word love inside out, you’re doing the best you can.

And, if you’re doing the best you can, what’s the worst that could happen?

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