There is nothing harder in the world in my mind than having to rebuild yourself from the bottom up when someone hurts you. You rarely know what direction to move in, what direction is even up, but you just start moving and hope you are going the right way. If it becomes necessary you make a few U-turns, but you just keep moving. You keep the things you liked about yourself, you look around and make an image of things you liked about your friends, and you even pick up a thing or two from a stranger you may never see again. You reevaluate everything about yourself. The values you upheld before may suddenly be different now, you might find that you are looking for something different than you were before, or maybe you are even finding that you don't really know what you want or who you are anymore. But you again just keep on moving and building, one step at a time, brick by brick.
And eventually you just throw caution to the wind, and hope that if you do indeed get hurt again, you can manage to rebuild and convince yourself to hold out and keep caring for others no matter how hard it gets to. But little do you know that a piece of you dwindles away each time you get hurt and you slowly turn yourself into a hollow being that will be so used to not caring, and not being cared for, that when it actually happens you will have no inkling of how to handle it.
