I want to protect you.

I want to hug you and protect you from yourself.

I wish I could wrap myself around people and protect them from darkness. I wish that everyone could see themselves the way I see them. I wish that everyone would be okay, and that everyone would love themselves. But that’s not how that works.

I’ve learned a lot about myself recently. I’ve learned I’m a challenger- someone who wants justice and needs to understand what’s going on to be on board. But I’ve also learned I’m a fierce protector. I fight tooth and nail to keep the very few people in my inner circle safe. I’ve learned I feel intensely. When I feel strongly about something, it almost hurts because I feel it with a passion so strong it fills my entire frame. And what I feel the most strongly about is people.

It hurts a lot sometimes to sit and think about how I can do nothing to help people in pain. So much that I can sink into it and be stuck in just how thick and oppressive that feeling is. I drown in it for a while, and it makes me cry. I want my friends to know their worth and that they mean the world to me and when they can’t, I’m in agony. I don’t hate much, but I do hate that.

I’m not afraid of what my friends deal with. It doesn’t scare me, and I am not ashamed. I wish you could see that it does not define you. Letting me know does not make it my project. In fact, letting me know, letting me in, is the one way to make me feel more safe around you.

I’m not afraid of what my friends deal with. But I’m terrified to let them in. I’m scared to be weak and vulnerable.

I went to go see a play recently, and I had listened to the songs a million times. But as I was sitting in the high school multi purpose room, listening to “There are Worse Things I Could Do” from Grease, I almost started crying. Which made me angry immediately, but only because I related so strongly to the line: “But to cry in front of you, that’s the worst thing I could do.”

I’ve come to realize being open with others means letting them see the raw parts of you- the parts that aren’t polished, the ones that haven’t finished developing. It means letting the people you trust see you broken and sobbing on the floor. Oh no, not the sweet little tears appropriate for church camp either. The messy kind where snot is coming out of your nose, your body is shaking, and every breath in makes a rasping sound. When you’re crying so hard you’re hyperventilating and it hurts to breathe and to feel and to be alive because you feel everything so so so strongly.

Being able to let someone see that hot mess, that means letting someone protect you for a change. It is the hardest thing in the world and I keep getting hurt and many times I just want to put up the walls and not talk to anyone ever because actually, that would be much easier. I’ve done it before. But I missed out on so much. I missed feeling things and sharing those passionate feelings with people I care about.

The problem is that I feel everything I care about so much that it’s hard to stop protecting everything and everyone for just a moment to let someone hold me. But I need to. I need to let someone just wrap their arms around the little girl curled up in a ball sobbing on the ground. I need to let them hold her tightly and tell her it’ll be okay, and that they love her even though she can’t always protect them.

Because I can’t protect you from yourself. And that hurts.