Jay-Z Wants You To Trust Your Heart

We get to return to love as we grow from our experiences

“Red or green pill, you live and you learn…” — Jay-Z “Excuse Me Miss”

Looks like we are riding off to the sunset… want to thank everyone who has read their column and shared their love for it on the interwebs. For now, the weekly Medium column “What Would Hov Do?,”, written by me, Joel Leon, will be on hiatus. I’ll still be on here writing and sharing my thoughts and words, but in a different, more personal way, so stay tuned!

For those who may be stopping by for the first time, the format has been fairly simple: you share with me something that you’re going through or that is troubling you, and I help you get through it, with a little assistance from jay-Z’s catalog. While the column may be on pause (for now) you can still feel free to drop your question here. Who knows, this column may show itself in another lifetime.

Anyhoot, for our last edition, I think it’s important we tackle a topic raised by someone we’ll just call “Returning Lover”. Returning lovers asks:

I recently left a toxic relationship that we could not fix together. Now a few months passed, and we have both made healthy and positive changes to improve ourselves. We have admitted our still strong love for one another…Would it be a good idea to reconcile, or would the toxic cycle just repeat itself again?

Wheeew…I know we’ve all been here at one point in time or another, myself included. The questions we have about a former flame can easily linger for weeks, months, years. In that period of time, we go through the motions of what could have been, should have been, or potentially could be. We keep low-key tabs one another, create burner accounts, we ask through mutuals about so-and-so, what they’re up to. We may even check-in from time to time…we watch their Stories, we scroll their Twitter feeds. All in an effort to see if the love is still real, if it’s still there, hoping maybe that they haven’t moved on. This happens whether the ending was amicable or not, or whether the love was healthy, or empty, or draining. Or, toxic.

A toxic love will leave you questioning your heart as a compass. You’ll ask why you allowed that kind of force to enter your space…