The Best Teacher We Choose

"I believe that we can all choose to be enough when we believe that we are. When you believe that you’re the right one for someone, you can be it. So when people say we deserve better, they’re actually just throwing away their chance to be that someone better we deserve.

Remember this. If they wanted to be right person for you, they would try. No matter how difficult or impossible it may seem, the ones who are worth it will know it’s worth trying. 

I choose to believe that the “right” love will not come easy. Love is something you work hard for, something you build. It’s not something that falls out from the sky served on a silver platter. Love is choosing to build something beautiful with someone. It is choosing to take a risk even with the chances of getting hurt. It is choosing to be strong enough to jump off a cliff with no assurance that someone will catch you. It is choosing the uncertainty that one day they may leave you. But at the end of the day, what will matter is that you choose to love, you choose to try.

No one’s ever difficult to love. It’s just that when it gets hard, you tend to lose sight of what matters and you find it difficult to stay in love. But at the end of the day, you choose to fight for it. You will choose to love, no matter how hard it gets. You will choose the person you love, not only when it’s easy but especially during the days that it gets hard. You choose them not because it’s convenient."
 

- Brianna Wiest

Love is the very best of us. It is the choice we see in another person, an opportunity to be kinder, more patient, trusting, and forgiving. It is the challenge we accept to be stronger, to be a braver person during times in which we feel like we'll be swept away in confusion or drowned at the bottom of our despair. It is the decision we arrive at through the storm to be right--right for ourselves and the one(s) we love.

It is how we will save the world and each other. But so often, so many of us don't choose it. Instead, we choose ourselves, to be selfish and invest in the one constant we can depend on: ourselves. Love is the best teacher, and to learn we must be willing to change. If we are not open to change and stuck in our rigid ways, we are not open to love.

This is the one takeaway from this summer: from the failed attempt to make a new life across the country, from a relationship that was sometimes too good and other times too bad that it came so close to failing too many times, from feeling so deeply disappointed and lost in myself for months. For myself, I will always choose to be better than what I am. I will always choose love, no matter what anyone says, because it truly, deeply, is the best of us. Where there is love, there is the potential for a kinder, braver, stronger me, and I promise to choose her--to be the right person, because in my short twenty three years on this earth, I have seen too many examples of people closing themselves off to love, to good things, to the chance to be the right person so many of us search for.

So: here's to you, my love, the imperfect person I have come to love, who has taught me so much about myself through our differences and similarities. You were my blessing; please continue to choose to be my blessing, to be mine, and to let yourself be open to feeling afraid of losing me, of feeling afraid of the hardships the future will bring, of feeling afraid of letting the gravity in your life change. Please do not close yourself off to feeling afraid of having your daily routine change. Do not close yourself off to feeling hurt; I know I have wounded you, and you have also wounded me, but we can't lose each other if I keep choosing you and you keep choosing me. Please open yourself to change, because that's the only way to love. I will not ask you to change for me but trust that through loving me, you will inevitably change, for I will balance out your flaws and you will balance out mine. I want to amplify your strengths and for you to amplify mine. If you choose love, it cannot change you for the worse. We only change negatively when we choose doubt, jealousy, fear, and selfishness in our love, and I want you to choose me. I want you to choose me, because I wake up every morning after each night of crying still wanting to choose you and the little universe we make between ourselves. If you choose not, I can and will still live a happy, fulfilling life of my own. I will still find my calling, my purpose, my passion.

But the distinction is that I want. I want. I want it with you.