"Take Another Little Piece of My Heart Now Baby"

You just have to throw you heart out there and see which dog attacks it.

Honestly- it's not a choice... your heart is yours to give away, sure, but it isn't always who you pick that matters. As we all know, some all too well, there isn't much you can say to rationalize why you want to be with someone even though you hardly know him or your friends advise you against it.

It just doesn't matter.

There is a peculiar internal discourse that somehow enables our rational minds to think that they know better than any feeling or inclination that we may have.

Somehow it seems that logic=truth in some minds, mine included... but the more I think about it, the more that seems absurd. If logic was the end-all, be-all, then feelings would have been rendered obsolete and things like sensitivity and crying and yelling and any other form of passion might indeed be deemed insanity; unnecessary displays of radical emotions, as if a mentally ill person just escaped from an institution...

Luckily, or unluckily as it may turn out, this is not the case.

It matters that I cry and scream and feel and want... it matters because love matters.

It's quite ridiculous to believe so intensely in something that can neither be defined nor proven... religion at least explains away things people don't/didn't understand and serves a purpose as a directed faith and a place to turn to when the world just isn't fair.... but love.... love makes no sense.

Think about it. What does love do for us?? Supposedly, it completes us; makes us unequivocally happy... but I've been happy before... It also wrecks us. Unrequited love might be the single most intense nonphysical pain that ever existed, although I can't be sure.

But this love idea... it gives us something to hope for, to obsess over, to pine for, to build our lives around; it creates a system of want and need that is so universal it is constantly exploited in books, movies, advertisements, you name it... yet we keep coming back. We keep trying to define it and more than that, we keep up the hunt. We don't want to stop looking and we certainly don't want to stop believing that it exists and we can't bring ourselves to consider that it could be an exaggeration or even a wish of a poet or a dream of a painter... we believe in it with all our heart... which is interesting in itself... where does emotion live? If you get a heart transplant, does your soul get replaced too? It seems the answer is no... so why the heart? Why do we want to give it so bad and although it is the strongest muscle, it seems so fragile.... or is that just our mental state?

There is no easy way to wrap your head around this and this conversation could go on for days on end... but the point of it all is whether or not emotions outweigh rationalization.

For me, who am I to stop myself from things that I want? I am 21 years old... how much wisdom about my future or any future could my rational mind have obtained when I wasn't paying attention?? Do I honestly know better?? How could I?

This is how we learn. We make mistakes because at the time, that is where we led ourselves...heart or soul, it doesn't matter. Let yourself be led by you. Go with it, wherever you end up, know that at the end of the day, you wanted it or thought it was right for you. There is no shame or blame in either of those.

We learn. We grow. We have to. There is no easy way. There is only the way we choose. And we are the only ones who can choose it.

There is no advice for the middle, but maybe there shouldn't be. This is where we learn and make mistakes and become who we are meant to become. The middle is where all the passion lies that makes the end worth it.

"Life, he realized, was much like a song. In the beginning there is mystery, in the end there is confirmation, but it's in the middle where all the emotion resides to make the whole thing worthwhile."
— Nicholas Sparks (The Last Song)