A sample of A Gentle Reminder by Bianca Sparacino (@Rainbowsalt)
By Bianca Sparacino
Dedication
for the deep feelers
Page 5
The right person will know how to hold your love. The right person will choose you just as deeply as you choose them. You will not have to quiet the way you care, you will never feel like you are too much. You will not have to beg for the love you deserve. One day, you will be met where you are. One day, you will be someone’s favorite thing, and you will not be confused — you will not feel like you are fighting for someone who isn’t fighting for you. One day, you will understand that it never mattered how tightly you held on to the wrong people, how intensely you tried, because the right people were always going to find you. The right people were always going to stay.
Page 6
Remember — even the strongest souls get exhausted. The strongest human beings, the ones who laugh the loudest and hope the hardest, the ones who are always there for others — those souls often need people there for them. So, please — check on your kind friends. Check on the people in your life who are tender, the ones who are always open to give so much of who they are for those who need it. Check on the people in your life who love with every ounce of their being, who feel deeply and care deeply, and try to fix and mend and make sure that those around them are okay. Please, just check on the people in your life who are brave, who are soft for this world. Check on the people in your life who protect others at all costs — because those souls need protecting, too. Those souls need to be reminded that they deserve the love they keep giving to everyone else.
Page 7
You have to let go. You have to let go because when you hold on, when you keep something alive inside of you, you are allowing for your past to take up the space in your heart and in your mind that is meant for your future. You have to let go because at the end of the day, if you are going to find the human being who is going to bring you the deepest kind of joy, if you are going to find the person who is going to help you experience the kind of love you have always deserved — you have to make sure that you are ready for it. You have to make sure that you will be open to it, and you cannot make a home within your heart for the person who will someday care for you in the softest of ways if someone else’s memory is still living there. You have to let go. You have to accept that sometimes beautiful things end, that sometimes people leave, that sometimes two human beings don’t beat the odds, and you have to find closure in that. You have to heal. You have to move forward, you have to believe in the version of you that is laughing in bed on a Sunday morning with the person they love twenty years from now, because you deserve that future. It is waiting for you. Choose it.
Page 8
It is okay to take your time. We live in a generation that romanticizes moving forward as quickly as possible when it comes to careers and our futures and our success within them. But there is no point in rushing quickly towards a life that will not inspire you or fulfill you. It is okay to slow down. It is okay to take the time you need. You are in no rush to figure out your own soul. It’s never too late to start over, it’s never too late to change your mind, it’s never too late to redirect yourself, to replace the dreams you thought you wanted for the ones that genuinely excite and challenge you.
So keep going — because the world needs your uniqueness. It needs your talent, your art, your mind. The world needs you to take up space within that, so you can change it with the vision that you have. You are so deeply capable of doing something beautiful with your life. Don’t let roadblocks, or self-doubt, or the way your journey is unfolding convince you otherwise. Leap towards all that scares and ignites you. Just try for something while you’re here.
Page 9
If it is for you, trust
that it will find you.
Page 13
When you are ready to put your heart into the world again, do not look for the kind of love you recognize, for the kind of love that mirrors something that did not beat the odds. Instead, search for the kind of love you need — as you are, in this season of your life. Do not compare it or doubt it when it arrives, because it will be different. It will always be different. It will hold you differently, and it will say your name differently, and it will laugh differently, and hope differently, and you will make different memories within it; you will feel it in your bones in a way that you won’t be able to express, in a way that will feel new and somewhat scary, but right. Do not seek familiarity, do not keep searching for your past in your future. Trust what comes.
Page 14
No one will ever fully be able to understand the internal battles you had to endure just to heal, just to grow, just to make it here today. Be proud of the way you fought to save yourself. Be proud of the way you survived.
Page 22
You deserve to be loved the way you love others. You deserve to feel seen. You deserve to sleep beside someone who does not try to quiet your heartbeat, or your passion, or the way you show up in this world. You deserve to be with the kind of person who loves all of your twists and does not try to untie them. You deserve to love someone who does not judge you for the ways in which you had to kill your sadness, someone who does not hold your past against you. You deserve to be chosen and to never be loved in halves. You deserve someone who is sure of you; you deserve someone who stays.
However, you also deserve to be this person for yourself. For your capacity to be alone, your capacity to be your own home, your own foundation, is going to directly reflect the way you love these human beings when they come into your life. When you know yourself, when you stand up for your heart, you do not bankrupt who you are just to keep half-loves in your life. Love becomes less about filling a void, love becomes less about possession, less about dependence, and it transforms into something that can be fully and deeply appreciated and felt, because you are not afraid that its loss will destroy you. You are not afraid of being without it, because you know that you will always have yourself.
Page 27
I think it’s beautiful — the way you show up in this world, unguarded and willing to try again, despite all of the ways it has tried to defeat you. I think it’s beautiful, the way you tuck courage into yourself each morning, the way you refuse to be anything but hopeful in this world, despite the inner battles you fight, despite the struggles you have experienced for so long. I think it’s beautiful — the way you twist your losses into lessons, the way you fight even when you feel weak. You are not weak. There is a resounding level of courage to be found in being the person who continues to heal, even when it hurts. There is a resounding level of bravery to be found in being the person who believes in the light, even when they cannot see it.
Pages 46–47
Maybe you will never get back to the person you used to be.
But maybe that is okay. Maybe that is something to celebrate, something to embrace, because who you were is a version of yourself that exists in the past. A version of yourself that didn’t go through the heartbreak or the hardship; a version of yourself that did not have to navigate all of the ways in which life was trying to weather it. Who you were is a version of yourself that didn’t have to fight their way out of the dark, that didn’t have to deal with the things that caused change to crack within the soul of you — and those things transform a human being.
Maybe you will never be reintroduced to that version of yourself. Maybe you will never get back to who you were. Maybe that version of yourself has evolved, has grown, into who you were meant to be at this moment in time. Maybe you have to lay down that expectation, maybe you have to release that comparison, and instead, maybe you have to trust in the lessons and the ways in which the world has asked you to stretch towards your becoming. Maybe you have to stop looking backwards.
Molting is the process by which a snake routinely casts off its skin to facilitate new growth, and sometimes life forces you to do the same. Sometimes, life challenges you to shed relationships, and ideals, and the old versions of yourself that no longer serve you. So when you feel like you are not the same person, when you feel like you have unraveled, like you have evolved into someone you do not recognize, maybe that is something to honor. You have transitioned, you have transformed, and life will ask you to do so time and time again as you journey through it. Do not fear your evolution. Claim it.
Page 52
To be who you are,
after all you have been through
at the hands of this world,
is beautiful.
Page 93
And what if they do leave? What if there does come a time where they cannot be what you need? What if you outgrow one another, what if you evolve into two people who cannot beat the odds? What if love changes, but what if there is still gratitude there? Gratitude for the way in which they stretched your heart into what it ended up becoming, gratitude for how they helped for you to find clarity in what you desire and what you strive to find in the next person life gifts you? Does that make it any less important, any less rich? Does that make it any less worthy of being felt, of having the kind of depth and connection that might not last forever, but that breeds the kind of lessons and knowledge and hope that will?
Do not be afraid to follow your heart.
Do not be afraid to try for something.
Page 113
Connections cannot be measured in time, but rather in how deeply they help you to see yourself. See, you can love someone for years and lose yourself. And yet, you can know someone for a week and see your whole soul in another human being. There are no rules when it comes to the heart and where it feels most safe. There are no timelines for this kind of depth. You just have to trust it. You just have to see it for what it is and understand that the universe sometimes fights for souls to find one another. It is not to be questioned. It is not to be compared. It is simply just meant to be felt. Have the courage to feel it.
Publication details
Copyright © 2020 Bianca Sparacino. All rights reserved.
Published by Thought Catalog Books, an imprint of the digital magazine Thought Catalog, which is owned and operated by The Thought & Expression Company LLC, an independent media organization based in Brooklyn, New York and Los Angeles, California.
This book was produced by Chris Lavergne and Noelle Beams and designed by KJ Parish. Special thanks to Isidoros Karamitopoulos for circulation management.
Visit us on the web at thoughtcatalog.com and shopcatalog.com.
Made in the United States of America.
ISBN 978-1-949759-29-7
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