5 AM Realist.

I couldn't sleep last night which is absolutely nothing new. So as soon as I saw the first sign of the rising sun I laced up my running shoes and took off into the early hours of Saturday morning.

One of the things I'm constantly thinking about are my relationships. Lately I've been thinking about how I've gotten where I am. The roads I've taken, and the choices I've made.

About half way through my run this morning I realized that a continual struggle I have when it comes to men, dating, the idea or concept of love is that I so desperately long to be a romantic but after countless heartbreaks and overwhelming heartaches an avalanche of hurt swept me up and I found myself taken from a beautiful hope filled place of optimism and romanticism to a valley of frustration and realism.

Now I'm not saying there is anything wrong with being a realist when it comes to love. Being a realist has its benefits for sure, but there is a problem when being a realist means not being who or how you are at your core.

For as long as I can remember I had a beautiful idea of how I wanted my life to go. I wanted to be the girl who waited for the right guy. The girl who didn't settle, who was willing to make personal sacrifices for something I had yet to find. But slowly, after getting hurt and rejected over and over I began to see myself as foolish to believe that some guy was out there waiting for me, looking for me like I anxiously sought him. 

I remember the day I put romanticism in a box and decided to be a realist.  I in no way regret that day or the decisions that followed because I've grown, and learned a lot since. I've found parts and pieces of me I didn't know existed. I've grown up a lot emotionally and even mentally since becoming a realist.

However since that day, since those decisions I made there has been an inward battle I've been fighting. I have been living as a realist but I am no realist, I long for the passionate, for idealism, however, I put that part of me away so long ago that it's now covered in dust; hidden from me, now very foreign and now very scary.

How I long to be a romantic again, to get back to believing that I don't have to settle, that I will find what I greatly desire.  How I long to once again believe in the seemingly impractical.

However, romanticism, something that was for so long a part of me, is now completely terrifying because it takes faith that I've lost,  it takes hope that I struggle to have, it takes fighting for something I can't be sure even exists.   Allowing myself to be a romantic again would mean allowing a part of me that I’ve been suffocating to come to bloom again. I would have to bravely allow myself to hope and dream again.  I would have to let the passion, the idealism, the most impractical and possibly even foolish thoughts once again flow from my heart.  I would have to go back to parts of my former self. A self I have for so long been hiding away, too afraid to revisit.