“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

— C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves

i’m getting more and more afraid that, in my loneliness, and in my attempt to be impervious to sexual desire, this is what i have been doing to my heart. it’s already starting to show in some ways. i think what scares me more is that i don’t know how to stop it. i don’t know how to be unafraid of being vulnerable toward people, of being open to the possibility of being affected by them. :(