How I’m Still Learning to Love After Being Broken

There are moments when I catch myself wondering—how did I become this person? How, after carrying the weight of so much pain, do I still want to love? How do I still open myself to others when so many have left me shattered, raw, and wary?

It’s a question I don’t have a simple answer for. But I think it comes down to a paradox I’m still trying to understand; that the places trauma breaks us are often the same places where love begins to root.

Trauma doesn’t just take away—it also teaches. It exposes us to our own fragility in the most brutal ways, yes, but it also forces us to confront what it means to be human, to be vulnerable. And in that confrontation, something unexpected happens. A door cracks open. Not to something easy or comfortable, but to something profoundly real.

The truth is, loving after trauma isn’t a choice made from a place of innocence or optimism. It’s a choice made from the depths of knowing what loss and betrayal feel like. It’s a decision to engage with the world, even when the risk of pain feels enormous—because the alternative is to shut down, to numb out, to live half-alive.

I’ve wrestled with this: the instinct to protect myself by building walls versus the fierce, almost stubborn impulse to keep reaching out. The impulse to believe that beneath the damage, beneath the scars, there is still something whole and capable of connection.

Sometimes, the act of loving feels less like a gift I’m giving to others and more like an act of rebellion against what tried to break me. It’s a refusal to let pain define the limits of my heart.

And maybe that’s what love becomes in the aftermath of hurt: not a naive hope, but a radical, gritty persistence. It’s messy, uneven, terrifying—and sometimes it falters. But it keeps showing up, even when the fear says don’t. Even when the history screams to retreat.

I’m still learning what this means, day by day. How to hold my scars without letting them harden into bitterness. How to be tender with myself and others, even when trust feels fragile. How to love fiercely without losing sight of the self that needs protection.

It’s not easy. It’s not clean or simple. But it’s real. And in that reality, I find something I never expected: strength born from brokenness, and a heart that keeps choosing to open despite everything it’s endured.

If you’ve ever wondered how you’re still standing after everything that’s tried to break you—if you’ve ever questioned why you still want to love, even after being gutted by betrayal, grief, or loss—I want you to know this: you’re not alone.

There’s no rulebook for surviving the things we were never meant to endure. No perfect formula for learning how to love again with a body that flinches at shadows and a heart that’s been bruised too many times. But if you’re still reaching, still trying, still soft in places that could’ve turned to stone—then you are doing something remarkable.

Loving after trauma isn’t weakness. It’s resilience. It's the quiet, steady insistence that you are more than what was done to you.

And that deserves to be seen.

This post is a response post to: "I Hate Anxiety - More Than the Trauma That Caused It"