"Where has my heart gone? An uneven trade for the real world"

When I first arrived to Italy, I was feeling whimsical and poetic, but in a melancholic way--the curse of an artistic personality perhaps--and this phrase above over and over was repeating itself in my head.

Indeed, where had my heart gone? Of course I still had one, but it was walled and changed; different from the innocent, naive, loving, open and overly giving heart that had been with me since I could remember, but began to shift the past few years.

"I want to go back to believing in everything and knowing nothing else"

As things would rattle and attack this innocence, I would try harder and harder to protect that heart, often leading to worse outcomes, and ultimately leading to a hear more walled.

But a heart of love and giving, openness and hope, is never worth the trade of a walled heart of cynicism and darkness disguised as realism and logic that life and other humans may try--subconsciously or consciously--to force on you.

✍🏼 "Where has my heart gone? Lost in the eyes of a stranger"

Indeed, there were times when I looked in my eyes and saw a stranger staring back. More hardened and cold than I liked seeing. More independent than I would like. The biggest wisdom I have taught myself is to protect the inner child and to stay connected to her. It is a fine balance between keeping this idealistic, optimistic, romantic, and innocent heart alive, and protecting it, but it is a line important to master, as I learn everyday, so you do not get to the point where you look in a mirror and wonder where the hardness has suddenly come from.

"I still recall the world from the eyes of a child...somehow it seems colder now"

Time and time again, when I thought I had learned the balance, I would lean too far one way. But Rome, as I'm often reminded these days, was not built in a day. Italy, I'll admit did wonders to reviving the heart I loved. I look in my eyes and more and more, I see that heart, and the eyes full of wonder belonging to it.

Let the darkness, coldness, evil in the world; let the hate, the cynicism, the anger, the pain, the judgement, the stubbornness, the absence of love, and lack of hope; let it not be you.

It is not possible to go through life without these waves of hurt, but let them be only waves that crash upon you, but that then leave you with the hurt dripping away, allowing you to fully dry. And when they leave, build yourself a more strategic wave barrier, yet a wave barrier still open and low enough to always view the beauty of the sea.

The light in my eyes has returned to me, may it return to you as well ✨

**The words in quotation marks between the paragraphs are lyrics from "Field of Innocence - Evanescence"