Stephanie Pusca’s Reviews > Conversations on Love > Status Update

It’s important to realise that we’re still ourselves, that there’s an essential self that’s still there, separate to the future you may have lost.
A friend, a sister, a mother, a person with purpose.

How do you mourn the loss of a future you never really had?

To stay conscious enough to see the smallest moments of our lives in all their shining detail.
To fully understand and see all the versions of ourselves, so that we might find the courage to show them to another human, in the light, and trust that they will love us for all of them.

That’s a wonderful thing, when you see the goodness of someone you love, and you watch them pouring that goodness into your child.

The friends I've known since I was a child are the most precious relationships. No matter how distant you have become from yourself, no matter how much your relationship/career has changed you, you can still connect with a person who knew you when you were a teenager. An old friendship is one of those things that helps you remember who you are in the world, and that's so valuable.

Although you have to work on a relationship, you shouldn’t have to work on convincing someone to love you.

Romance is finding ways to show someone they’re appreciated. (…)
Love doesn’t disappear when you aren’t quiet and perfect.

I still struggle with articulating my needs. (…) Believing that I deserve love is a work in progress for me.

When you don't understand or value yourself it's
more difficult to generate love for other people. It made me see, too, that I had never really loved the men I'd dated and idealized in my twenties. I had not been invested in helping them grow, or in seeing the whole of who they were, because I was more interested in how I looked in their perception of me. It was a half-hearted version of love, rooted in ego.

“I need to work on breaking out of my role as caregiver, because that's rooted in wanting to be needed. I've woven a big part of my identity through looking after people, and I know that part of love in friendship is asking for your needs to be met too.” - Candice Carty-Williams