In my experience, love oftentimes takes on a face that is not your own. The desire to keep falling deeper never stops. And you become less and less of yourself.
This stripping of your identity doesn’t feel terrifying at the time, which is why you let it happen. Then one day you wake up and don’t recognize the face staring back at you in the mirror. A pit forms in your stomach because you know deep down in the core of you that it doesn’t feel right. But your love is growing, so it is easier to ignore it. That pit is your intuition. Webster defines intuition as the following: in·tu·i·tion noun
A lot of people lump the description of an intuitive person in with fortune tellers, clairvoyants, and soothsayers. We tend to think of intuition as a hippy-dippy notion; spiritual capital. Why? Maybe it’s because intuition comes from a feminine place inside of us, and femininity can feel weak. Sometimes we separate the person from the intuition. “I don’t have good intuition.” That statement makes me cringe when I hear it. First of all, you don’t have to be a spiritual thinker to “have” intuition. We all have the capacity for intuition. Secondly, I think by shrugging our shoulders to intuition, it allows us to tell others (and lie to ourselves) that our bad decisions are justified. "I just don't have good intuition." Don't do that to yourself. I think where people get caught up is in the overthinking. Intuition is rooted in the autonomic systems of our body. Intuition is limbic in nature, even though we always talk about feeling intuition in a guttural sense. For most, intuition comes as a gut feeling, or as above, for me, a pit in your stomach. We can interpret intuition as our first, automatic response to a scenario. We don’t have to understand where this feeling or “hunch” comes from in our brain, it just is. And possibly, because it is an automatic response, we often dismiss it, preferring thinking over feeling, because we have been taught to analyze our thoughts and make decisions based on rationale. And because thinking is comfortable. Feeling is scary. For me I’ve recognized intuition to be a rare and beautiful break for my mind. Intuition gives my brain seventeen seconds of peace. The rest of the time my thoughts, reasoning, and logic scuffle about inside my skull, a cacophony of voices speaking over each other, shouting about which one of them is the most right. Listening to all of that all of the time is fucking exhausting. It is also perhaps why I don't sleep. Years and years of choosing logic over intuition made my brain into a prison for my thoughts. Essentially I think we need a balance between the reason and the intuition. Some days we pick the lawyer, some days we pick the monk. Some of us are born with strong intuition, an innate propensity to hear and trust our own instincts, and we spend the rest of our lives unlearning it. It’s a bit ironic, all the knowledge we dump into our brains in order to gain clarity, perhaps ultimately only serves to occlude us. Somewhere in between falling in love and heartbreak, I stopped listening to my intuition. I don’t think I ever stopped hearing it, but I definitely ignored it. I chose ignorance, but missed the memo on the bliss part. And here is what I learned about intuition and love along the way. First love throws a pillow case over your intuition’s head, pushes it into the back of a rusty minivan, and holds it hostage in an abandoned warehouse, gun to its head, for ten years. True, pure love waits patiently outside the scene of the crime with a warm blanket and a gracious, welcoming smile. True love calls your family to tell them you are okay. But it is self-love that finally pulls off that pillowcase and unties your wrists. Self-love gives you back your freedom. The terrible truth then is not that you were kidnapped, but that your captor has since long gone. It’s the realization that you had been alone the whole time, and you could have saved yourself.
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