Love After Love Derek Walcott

After a harsh, emotionally exhausting breakup, everyone’s question is always the same: “When will I stop feeling like hell?”  The answer is as follows: whenever you learn to love yourself.  People come and people leave; the trick to remaining happy is knowing yourself and understanding your heart. Derek Walcott made me remember countless high school dramas and social encounters that leave the heart throbbing and screaming for help. But truly, there comes a time in everyone’s life, man or woman, when we have to realize that the only time to really feel love again is when we learn to love the person we are.”Each will smile at the other’s welcome,” states, when you realize that the person looking back at you in the mirror is actually not such a failure at  love and life after all, you will then welcome the confidence and security that follow.  What is life without tears and mumbled curse words for those who have shown us how little we care for ourselves? Through every fight and disagreement, every pointless argument, we find out who we are. As humans, we learn over time to adapt to situations and stay away from those which may bring us pain, but why is it that people always revisit the opportunity of loving again?  Because we have to feel something to live; and often, feeling something means learning from ourselves everyday.  When Walcott states that you should “take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, and the desperate notes;” he means to show you that you must delete all those things in your life that bring back the person you were, and adapt to the person you want to be.