Ashish Bagrecha - Dear Stranger, You Deserve To Be Loved

for all the strange us.

in loving memory of Chris Adams,
dearest brother, truest friend and
the most fearless dreamer i ever knew.
you were an abundance of love and light.

if a human heart can feel infinite pain,
it can also feel infinite love.

CONTENTS

A) Loving Yourself

B) Building Lasting Relationships

C) Living a Meaningful Life

So, I am back and without wasting any more time, lets get to the truth. Everything we do in life is for love. Why? I dont know. Maybe love is what keeps us going. Maybe love is the means and ends to this life. Maybe the Universe runs on love. Whatever maybe the reason, love is what we all demand and love is what we all want.

But very often, we find ourselves without love. Some of us have even stopped believing in love. Right? And for some of us, its worse because we dont feel we deserve to be loved. Well, I know all of this because I myself didnt believe I was deserving of love, for many years of my life. I truly understand how it feels like to be alone. To be rejected by the people you share your affections with. To be searching for someone to love all your life. To be hurt by love again and again. Honestly, Ive been at rock bottom when it came to love, I had no love in my heart for others and even struggled with finding love within me for myself. But now, after three decades of my life, I find myself amidst abundance of love to give and receive. Surprised? I will tell you how this happened.

Over the years, I have tried to observe, analyze, experience and feel love in a thousand different ways. My quest to understanding love led to me to a realization of a thousand different things about it. And like always, I want to share with you my simple findings about this complex feeling if only you give me a chance. A chance to walk together. A chance to blossom together. A chance to feel loved.

You see, when I wrote my first book, Dear Stranger, I Know How You Feel, it gave me the chance to connect with people all over the world. I understood that everyones story is always a bit messy, complicated, and each as unique as a snowflake. Well I dont know the challenges with love that you have faced in your life but whatever youre going through, just know that you are not alone. I might not be able to picture your face in my mind or call you on the phone but, dear stranger, please know that I have been where you are now. I have felt empty inside and spent my days alone feeling lost, as Im sure you feel now. But now you dont have to feel that way anymore. Your favorite stranger is here to help you. To show you, my friend, that it is possible to heal. It is possible for you to find the love in your life that you have always desired.

Which is why I wanted to write this book. To inspire you to believe and dream of a different world, where the love you want to give and receive comes easily to you. No matter how misunderstood you feel, no matter how low or uninspired you may feel right now, there is always hope. To love more, to live bigger, and to start saying yes to life and all the things that you hold dear. I know youve heard this word, hope , a million times from a million people in a million different ways and youre tired of hearing it. So I am not going to use that word. I am going to give you another word, okay? Faith. Because faith is more powerful than hope. Its difficult but effective. Most importantly, faith doesnt fade like hope. So no matter what dark place you feel stuck in, I want to provide you with faith, a beam of light, to show you the way out. It is easy, when youre in the dark to see darkness everywhere. But it takes the mind of a believer to try and see the light. And there is always light, my friend. There is always love being extended to you for you are love. The Universe loves you deeply, I love you deeply, and the people in your life love you deeply. You might not agree with me right now but by the end of this book, I hope you do. Well, I have faith that you will.

I was once in a dark place, where things like faith and love were hard for me to see. I have experienced rejection, denial, pain, and solitude. When I was struggling to love others and love life, I wish that someone would have told me that my feelings were normal. I wish someone could have shown me that there was another way to think; another way to be in the world. I wish I didnt feel so alone, even when surrounded by people. The more I have shared about my own mental and emotional struggles, the more I realized that other people struggle too, only silently. There is no sense in staying quiet and suffering alone. Our pains may be unique but the reasons we have these pains are not. In this book, I hope you will see that your pain is my pain. That even the worst heartbreak can be overcome. Even if its hard for you to see right now, trust that you will learn. That you will overcome this darkness that keeps you feeling heavy.

And that is why, Im writing these thirty letters and poems for you. Letters of self-realizations about love and everything around that. Lessons Ive learnt in my journey about loving myself, building lasting relationships and aspiring to live a meaningful life. One letter for each day to make you realize that you deserve to be loved deeply and completely. That you deserve to have a life that is brimming with the love that you have dreamed about. And this time, I have also added some suggestions for you at the end of every chapter. Little course of actions which helped me turn my life around and can help you do the same as well. I really hope youd try to do them atleast once. Trust me, they will give you the answers you are looking for.

Honestly, I dont want to change the world with this book. All I want is to help one person feel less alone. To have one person read these words and feel empowered and hopeful for the future and their lives. I hope this brings you comfort; to know that your pain is shared by many. I hope this brings you the gentle compassion that you need to soften against the harsh and sharp edge of the world. I hope that you feel inspired to connect with people differently and heal your relationships; your relationship with yourself, and with people in life that you truly care about. Dear stranger, you deserve to be loved deeply and completely. You deserve to have a life that is brimming with the love that you have dreamed about and you are in control. Where there is pain and darkness, there is always healing that must be done. It can be hard, to heal those parts of yourself that have felt broken for longer than you care to admit. Healing has a funny way of taking you on a ride of ups and downs but the love you seek exists. Its out there, waiting for you to say yes.

Dont give up. I am rooting for you. Lets do this together? Shall we, my dear stranger?

you are not hard to be loved
you are hard to be unloved.

-note to self

Dear Stranger,

Love yourself, love yourself, love yourself! Thats what you are being told every day by influencers, brands, social media. But every time you decide to love yourself, people call you selfish. You dont listen to them for a while but then it starts bothering you. It makes you feel guilty. And you give up. The idea that loving others is the one only true selfless act and people who love themselves are selfish deepens inside your brain every passing day. Trust me, I know that conflict very well. And the scariest part is when you feel youve nothing inside you that can be loved. You feel you dont even deserve to be loved by your own self.