I realize now that I was not always good at loving, nor at allowing myself to receive it.
Sometimes, all I knew how to show were the wounds I was still carrying.
I was still learning what love meant.
Looking back, I understand that the way I saw love did not start in my relationships —
it started much earlier.
In my childhood.
A version of me that was still learning what love meant.
When I look at this photo, I don’t see someone who understood love —
I see someone who was trying to feel it in any way he could.
Back then, I didn’t fully understand love,
but I was still searching for it in everything.
Sometimes through attention.
Sometimes in too being seen.
Sometimes in moments that felt like warmth, even if they did not last.
Without realizing it, I carried that understanding into my relationships.
I thought love was something you chase,
something you prove,
something you hold on to tightly so it doesn’t leave.
But when I look at my actions, I see something different.
It was not always love.
Sometimes, it was fear.
Sometimes, it was the need to feel seen.
Sometimes, it was the echo of something I never fully received.
When you are still healing,
you don’t just love —
you react from what shaped you.
And I was shaped long before I understood it.
That is where the confusion came from.
Not because love is complicated,
but because I was trying to love while still carrying parts of myself I had not yet faced.
Over time, I began to see something clearly:
Love is not something you chase.
And it is not something that fixes what is broken inside you.
It is something you learn to meet,
once you begin to understand yourself.
And maybe that is what I was really learning all along.
Not just how to love someone else —
but how to understand the version of me that never learned it properly.
This painting felt like releasing a part of me that was never fully seen.
In the end, I began to understand something simple:
not everything that feels like attention is love.
And not everything that feels like love is meant to stay.
Some reflections stay as words.
Others become something you can carry.