Once upon a time, there was a princess who longed to be the village witch…

For a long time, I wasn’t a fan of the phrase, “You have to love yourself before anyone else can love you.” To me this suggested that until I could love myself, I wasn’t worthy of the love of anyone else. You can imagine the struggle I faced, growing as best I could within an environment that repeatedly told me I was wrong, incorrect, flawed.

What about me is there to love? I wondered sadly.

My sadness grew to frustration, as each passing day brought more and more for me to loathe in myself. And the feedback of my reality just confirmed every dark belief I had.

But amidst all the chaos, I had art. And I was good at it. I could take the beautiful worlds I imagined in my mind, that I knew weren’t real, and bring them into my reality.

I had music. Where I could escape my reality into a world where I was understood, where my feelings mattered; where I felt I belonged.

And love stories. Oh, so many love stories…

Once upon a time…

Everyone has a fairy tale fantasy in their mind. If you don’t think you do, look again. It may not look like everyone else’s, but it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t have to tick any fairy tale boxes or fit into any fantasy molds. It just has to resonate with your heart.

Many of my fantasies were built upon by the books I would read, usually in which a strong-willed woman would go against what the world dictated she could be, fighting against the role she never wanted to play, and finding some devastatingly delicious man along the way to support her cause and raise his sword alongside her own. *sigh*

By the time I was in high school I regularly haunted my local library’s historical romance section, immersing myself in beautiful stories of people who were chosen, who were loved and still loved, no matter what happened. When I say “chosen”, I mean when the two love interests met, the connection was so intense and real, and even when they were irritated with the other person (which always happened), they knew they loved them anyway; nothing was going to sway them from that. That was their person, no matter what.

I was and am fully aware that these stories were fiction. The odds of me learning I had secret royal blood were less than none, and most males I had met up to that point wouldn’t be caught dead holding a door, let alone a sword. However, what I loved about these stories was that someone, somewhere, had imagined a love so beautiful, so powerful and full of adventure and laughter and deep trust. And if they could imagine it in such detail, then to me, that meant they were capable of feeling it, which meant all of us – including me – held the potential to love that deeply, to know someone that intimately, to allow them into every dark corner of your being and know they would still love you, no matter what they found.

And I wanted that. So badly.

…the princess grew up…

I feel like my love for those stories sustained me sometimes.

I had a very hard time in high school, with school, with friends, with family, and deeply with myself. The desire to get up in the morning was frequently non-existent. One thing that helped me get through, were love stories. I would always have a romance novel on me, in my purse for waiting rooms, tucked inside my history text book during a lecture (insert funny story: historical romance novels can actually be quite funny, and I once laughed out loud in the middle of a lecture and my teacher knew immediately that I wasn’t finding any humour in Laurier’s compromises), and open on the desk if we had even a moment of free time.

The possibility of Great Love gave me something to look forward to. To hope for. Something bright and brilliant at the end of the dark tunnel of my life.

That being said, we really need to stop writing stories where fifteen-year-olds meet the love of their life in biology class. High School Sweethearts exist, but they’re not as common as YA wants us to believe.

I digress.

I knew I wasn’t going to find love in high school, and I didn’t want to. I wasn’t “ready” yet. I wasn’t happy with myself physically, and I wanted to be far away from my life when I fell in love. I was also open to love being my exit; the chance for a better, happier life to pull me away from the depression and anxiety I existed within. But I knew that wasn’t likely.

I had held some hope for college being the doorway to romance, but my personal life got worse, my health got worse, and things in general just got darker. More of the same into my early twenties.

I went through a number of short-lived relationships, unsure of what I was even doing or looking for. My twisted sense of self and the awful examples of relationships that surrounded me every day (outside of my beloved books) had confused my ideas of what a “good relationship” should look like. I saw people together that were not compatible at all, couples that fought constantly, complained about each other constantly, met and decided to date because why not. The “strong” couples were the ones that stayed together anyway. I thought all the time, “This cannot be how this works. This cannot be all there is.” It made no sense to me. There were no real examples of love around me. And sadly, on the rare occasion someone worth growing close with came along, my deprecating self-hatred steered me away.

Because they “deserved better”.

But how could I find love without letting anyone in?

How could someone love me if I didn’t love myself?

How could I be with someone if I wasn’t worthy of being loved?

The romance novels I read started to get darker. Gothic romance is beautiful, but these were different. These were dangerous. The stories were more intense, people were dying, no longer fighting for king and country, but fighting to survive and keep their loved ones alive.

I started to wonder if the greatest of loves could only come into being once they’d been tested to their breaking point. When someone’s life hung in the balance, suddenly love became clear.

Please don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t considering endangering myself to find love. That wasn’t it at all. I just began to feel like great love took great circumstances, and I wasn’t worthy of so powerful a story. And even if I found myself on the brink of death, my lover would not fly to my rescue.

…and became the village witch.

I fell in love a few times over the years. I stayed in relationships that I later realised were completely toxic, filled with gaslighting and verbal abuse, repeated situations that left me feeling unsafe and unloved and unwanted. I endured years of emotional pain, years that I will never get back. Years that I could’ve spent building a life for myself if I hadn’t chosen love, hoping that this time, this time, it would be real.

I wrote my blog post Unbroken Heart about one of those relationships, before I really saw it for the absolute mess that it was, six months before it began its final death rattle. It was written in a moment of feeling deep love for that person, when we were breaking up, though we would come back together again shortly after. And I wouldn’t take back a word of it, because in that moment it was real to me. I won’t rob my past self of those feelings just to justify the horrible things he did later.

But after that final disaster ended, I did something I had wanted to do all my life. Something everyone told me I would never do, could never do, all on my own.

I built a life for myself.

I worked my ass off and finally put a roof over my head. I packed up my life into boxes and bags, stored half of it in my brother’s garage and got a tiny apartment with just me, my cats…and all of my books.

It was hard; there were weeks the cats weren’t the only ones eating out of cans. But we made it work. I made it work. Because I had finally, finally, tasted freedom, and I was not giving it up for anything.

My witchcraft practice had never left me in all my years of darkness, and I poured love into my relationship with it. Because I finally had a space that was all mine, just mine, I lived as freely as I’d always dreamed. I built a beautiful altar space. I had crystals and candles in every room. I hung herbs to dry in the kitchen. I filled the space with greenery that mostly consisted of propagated spider plant babies (all named – Terrence was the first successfully propagated baby; he was also the first to be eaten, and we learned the importance of plant placement that day).

I started painting again. I started dancing again. I started cooking again. I started writing again.

I started falling in love with my books again. 🖤

I remember sitting by the open window, feeling the warm breeze, sipping my hot coffee, a purring kitty and open book close by, and I thought, “I did it. I made it.” And I consciously took a deep breath.

And through all of it, somewhere along the way, despite some dark days, I started falling in love with myself, maybe for the first time.

In the two years I spent alone with myself, I learned so many lessons. Surprising ones, hard ones, deep ones. I even learned I may prefer a princess come to me than a prince. More than anything though, I learned what I was truly capable of, and that by being for myself what I had always been told someone else had to be for me, I could actually heal. I looked in the mirror and saw a broken girl who had grown into a strong woman, with the scars to prove it. I learned I had always been a solitary creature forced to believe that I needed relationships to survive, when I may have thrived on my own all those years. I would never know now, but I knew going forward I would always choose myself first. I would always put myself, and every broken girl inside me, before anything else. And I learned that I was worthy of much more than the boxes I had broken us free of.

I learned I was deeply worthy of real love…and I had been all along.

No one is coming to save you.

As a witch, I know that love is one of, if not the most, powerful forces in existence. I say this with no fluff or woo-woo attached. I have witnessed the power of love. And while it may not move mountains or stop wars, it changes lives, saves lives, and it makes the world more beautiful. It makes people more beautiful.

It’s easy to see why we think great love will solve all our problems. The idea of a handsome prince arriving at our door on his noble, white steed to lift us out of our boring lives seems a dream. Perhaps as we move through the years, the handsome prince becomes a warrior king, arriving with a clash of thunder and swords, rearing on a massive dark horse, to rescue us and cut down anything and anyone who dares come between him and his queen. Bonnie Tyler had it right all along.

Perhaps your fantasy looks completely different. I have one where I’m humming in my little witchy cottage in the woods, blending herbs amongst lazy cats and singing birds, when a princess suddenly tumbles through my door:

I started falling in love with romance again, with novels steeped in adventure and that great love I’d always adored.

A couple of times in those two years I tried dating again, men and women, but I wasn’t ready. It was a relief to know it wasn’t because I didn’t love myself, but I was still getting to know myself again, and what within me still needed healing. I endured one very short dating experience with someone who I should have dropped the second I met him, and the weeks that followed were like a masochistic lesson in what I was still willing to allow to happen to me, instead of standing in the truth that I deserved better. It was so painfully obvious that I actually dipped into a fresh phase of questioning my own judgement, and wondering if I really did deserve all the great things I’d somehow convinced myself I did.

We all misstep. We all spiral. Life happens. We’re our own worst enemy…and also our own deepest friend.

I found my way back and cut off all ideas of a relationship for another six months. I still needed time with myself, and that didn’t mean avoiding romance; I still had my books. It just meant understanding they were stories to appreciate, not aspire to.

One day, I was out driving along some of my favourite backroads, with my windows down and my music loud (naturally). I was deep in thought, thinking about life, about love, and about what I wanted. I was listening to one of my favourite bands, Avenged Sevenfold, and their album Hail to the King. I’m one of those people who can imagine an entire story within a single song. I love lyrics, and the art they hand my imagination to run with. The first time I heard the song Acid Rain, the chorus hit with haunting beauty:

Children still play in the garden
Dance as the sun slips away
Not even stars last forever
Cleanse us, acid rain

It’s my favourite song on the album. But this day, driving with the wind in my hair and so many thoughts in my head, it was in the third verse that I felt my heart move:

Stand near to me
Don’t look, be brave
Over the blackened moon
I’ll carry you away
Through the planets, we fly

*swoon*

Something reawakened in me that day. A spark amidst a sea of embers.

I came across a quote on Pinterest, that I later learned was from Scarlett St. Clair’s fantastic book, A Touch of Ruin:

“Are you saying you wouldn’t fight for me?”
Hades sighed, and brushed his finger along her cheek, “Darling, I would burn this world for you.”

It had been a long time since I had to set a book down and walk to the window for air. Sometimes romance hits like that.

*sigh*

Happily Ever After

I didn’t fall back into my patterns of seeking love outside of myself. Any time I felt myself growing frustrated that I had no partner to share my days with, I looked in the mirror and remembered that I was sharing my life with the person I had avoided for most of it. I was finally seeing myself, and knowing myself. And that was worth its weight in priceless gold.

I flirted at the edge of the dating pool without throwing any hooks. I no longer chased, after all. I attracted. And I knew I was capable of great love. I wasn’t going to suffocate it for someone unworthy of meeting it.

And then I met him.

His eyes were the first thing that got me. He doesn’t like them, but I love them. Deep, warm brown. The safest space I’ve ever seen. They hide veins of amber when the sunlight hits them just right. He was honest, and polite. He was patient and open. From day one he hid nothing from me. I was so used to being lied to, it was disarming to be trusted, and know that trust was echoed back. He asked me questions about myself, not my work. He loved my art and supported my writing. He opened his life to me without any hesitation. He didn’t tell me I was hot; he called me “radiantly beautiful”.

The first time we met in person, we smiled and hugged. And then, unplanned, surprising us both, we kissed. What happened in that moment you may only believe within fiction.

Imagine summer lightning with no rain, a burst of butterflies from a windy garden, a murmuration of starlings, the moment the crescendo of a song breaks across the surface of your skin…

It was like that.

And I knew.

I didn’t know what great love was going to feel like…but I knew what magick felt like.

Lightning. Wings. Music.

This was real.

So what have I learned?

Do I believe you have to love yourself before anyone else can love you? No, but I know it certainly helps. Not because you are unworthy of another’s love until you’ve loved yourself; but because they may not be worthy of your love, until you’ve loved yourself enough to know that worth yourself.

Sometimes love isn’t found on the battlefield between kingdoms, but on the battlefield of life, as we navigate our way through shadow and uncertainty. Sometimes it isn’t found on a ballroom floor, but at the café counter, when you happen to look up at the same time.

Sometimes the only time they save you from monsters is when you’re running through the Skull Cavern, screaming, unable to find the sword they levelled up for you in your inventory, while they cut down every Desert Serpent on your haphazard tail. #iykyk

Sometimes love doesn’t come with a flash of lightning and a thundering of hooves. Sometimes love comes quietly.

And that’s okay, too.

Being your own true love is the greatest gift you can give yourself. Great love doesn’t, in fact, require great circumstance. Princes are often immature, princesses unsure, and knights hold much humbler roles than they once did.

There is nothing outside of you that you cannot find within. And there is no story that will change your fate. There is no one coming to save you.

Because, my love, all your life you have held the keys in one hand, and the sword in the other.

Open the gate. Off with their heads.

Fight for yourself, and trust yourself. Eventually you will love yourself. Give yourself the gift of radical compassion, and you will love yourself, one small breath at a time.

And you will realise you were worthy of greatness all along.

All my love,