Relearning How to Receive

Receiving is an act of trust, healing, and worthiness.

I am learning how to receive. And it is so much harder than I ever imagined.

For most of my life, I’ve known how to give. I know how to hold the weight of the room, the relationship, the family, the crisis, the entire world if I had to.

I know how to be strong. How to show up. How to love in ways that required pieces of myself I didn’t really have to spare.

What I didn’t realize back then was how much of that giving was survival.

It wasn’t just kindness.

It wasn’t just love.

It was bargaining.

Somewhere along the way, I absorbed this belief:

If I give enough…

If I love hard enough…

If I pour out enough…

If I become indispensable enough…

…Maybe you’ll finally see me.

…Maybe you’ll finally choose me.

…Maybe I’ll finally be worthy of love.

…Maybe you’ll stay.

So I over-gave. I carried what wasn’t mine. I shape-shifted. I bore the emotional labor, the responsibility, the silence, the grief.

I made myself endlessly useful, endlessly understanding, endlessly forgiving, because usefulness felt safer than being worthy. Because if I was easy, small, didn’t create problems, maybe the heaps of love I gave out would be returned. Because if I could prove my value, maybe I’d finally earn love that wouldn’t disappear.

But here’s the quiet truth I’m reckoning with now:

Over-giving is not love.

It’s fear dressed as devotion.

It’s self-abandonment disguised as loyalty.

It’s a heart trying desperately to not be left again.

And even after all that giving… I was still lonely.

Still unseen.

Still starving for the very tenderness I so freely offered everyone else.

So now, I am learning something new. I am learning that I don’t have to perform to be worthy. I don’t have to over-function to be kept. I don’t have to disappear inside someone else’s needs to deserve love that stays.

I am relearning how to receive, and the truth is…it is still not easy.

My mind knows I deserve care. My heart believes I’m worthy of being tended to. But my nervous system doesn’t always agree yet.

Receiving does not feel natural to me. It does not feel effortless. Sometimes it doesn’t even feel safe.

It takes conscious effort. I have to notice when I’m shrinking away from kindness. I have to unclench the reflex that says, “I’ll handle it myself.” “Don’t do it for me.” “Don’t make me need you.”

I have to resist the urge to apologize for being cared for.

Most days, receiving means sitting in the discomfort while the love is happening. Letting the support land even when my body rebels. Letting tenderness stay even when I want to retreat.

Letting kindness touch places that only learned how to give, not to be given to.

I am relearning how to let kindness reach me. How to let support in without apologizing for needing it. How to let myself be held without feeling like I owe something in return.

This is not weakness. This is rewiring.

Receiving doesn’t make me fragile. It makes me human.

Allowing care doesn’t make me a burden. It heals the part of me that learned I wasn’t worth tending to.

And maybe, one day, receiving won’t feel like courage. Maybe it will simply feel like breathing. Like rest. Like the way love is meant to live in a body that finally believes it doesn’t have to earn its place in the world.