on growing up believing love belonged elsewhere

 I think one of the saddest things about growing up feeling “bigger” was not just the insecurity itself… but what it slowly taught me to believe about love. Somewhere along the way, I think I started believing I could maybe be liked… but not fully chosen.And that’s the cruel thing about insecurity...after a while, it stops being just about how you look, and starts shaping what you think you deserve. For the longest time, I didn’t just question myself… I questioned whether I was ever truly worthy of being loved fully at all.

So when someone does care… when someone does look at you gently, choose you, want you… it almost feels suspicious.

Not because they’re doing anything wrong.

But because your mind has spent so long building this quiet belief that says, “Why you?”

And that thought… it can ruin beautiful things before they even begin.

Because instead of simply receiving love, you analyze it. Doubt it. Question their standards. Their intentions. Their sincerity. You almost judge them for loving you, because some wounded part of you genuinely cannot understand how someone could see something worthy here when you spent so long struggling to see it yourself.

You start thinking: Do they really know me? Couldn’t they do better? Are they settling? What do they see that I don’t?

And maybe that’s the heartbreaking part....when you’ve internalized feeling unworthy for so long, love can feel less like comfort… and more like confusion.

Like maybe they’re mistaken.

Like maybe if they look a little closer, they’ll realize what you’ve always feared.

And that kind of thinking is exhausting, because it turns love into something you have to intellectually justify instead of emotionally accept.

I think that’s what insecurity steals sometimes...not just confidence, but the ability to believe tenderness could actually belong to you too.

So now, I think healing looks like this: Learning that love is not automatically suspicious just because it feels unfamiliar. Learning that someone choosing me is not proof they lack better options. Learning that maybe I do not have to shrink, doubt, or question myself into deserving softness.

Because the real tragedy was never that I was hard to love, it was that I learned to believe I was.