I found a tiny, old sketchbook I'd had since 2000. Flipping through it, I found little poems, passages and thoughts that spanned one journey from longing to heartbreak, one rebound relationship, and stopped in 2003 at the start of the longest and most serious relationship I'd had up to recently. It describes a few dreams I'd had in the wake of heartbreak, including one which made me ache to remember - about an exorcism I was being put through, not of a spirit but of something unnamed yet necessary to exorcise.
The sketchbook was also speckled with snippets of one of my other loves at the time, astronomy. I looked to the night sky often, deeply, and lovingly at the time. (I still do, just nowhere as often.) Little stories about the constellation myths, a sketch of my favourite of them - Andromeda and others involved in her story - and a full list of all 88 constellations in alphabetical sequence.
1 April 2003, 12.08am, was my last entry in this sketchbook. I wrote about my idea of the difference between loving someone and being in love with them.
"One may use words to say how it is that they love someone, or why, or what it is they love about him/her. But being in love, that is an entirely different concept. Poets and painters have tried to embody it over the eons, but no words or images can claim to be the true expression of being in love - you just know it. It becomes you, fills you in that wordless, thoughtless enigma. How you can know something and yet not know it."
I was 24 then. That idea has changed a great deal since. I now know that being in love with someone is neither mysterious, nor thoughtless, nor unknowing. On the contrary, much like "gut instinct", it is your brain's way of streamlining a rational process so that you get the answer more quickly and with less energy spent on conscious thought. It's reasoning + bodily response + experience made efficient and quick - this is the right person for you at this point in time.
Loving, on the other hand, is a verb. It can take place with or without being in love with someone, though the former is much preferred in cases of romantic love. It is the ongoing process of caring, nurturing, expanding, complementing, negotiating, and all that hard work. Most of all, it is a choice.
Love is a choice. And it's not an easy one.
Which would you choose? To take the easy but lonely path, or the hard and reward-filled path that will expand your world and help you grow as a person? The safe but self-eroding path, or the difficult path that compels you to discover your authentic self?
Love is a choice. So let me ask you: do you love yourself?
Maslow's hierarchy of needs got it wrong. For adults, esteem and self-actualisation are greater than love needs. Without loving and discovering yourself, you cannot love others fully. However, esteem and love from others are interconnected - if you allow yourself to believe and deserve the love others share with you, loving yourself and growing as a person could be so much easier.
It's so much easier to believe the bad stuff than the good stuff, isn't it? I started believing the good things people who cared about me were telling me only after spending years beating myself up. I started trusting myself and them only after much painful experience.
Only after I started trusting did I start being able to push fear aside, and I:
- Tore down the stone walls around my heart
- Recognised who I am
- Discovered what I want
- Allowed myself to feel fear, and to give fear the finger anyway
- Started feeling true to myself
- Acknowledge that all of the above can and will change over time
- Most of all, accept that I will be hurt and that's ok
Here is my heart, it's wide open. Feel free to step inside.
