Finding My Way Back, formerly titled "I Am Done With Love"
A short(ish) week-end interlude about all types of love and asking the hard question(s).
I got in the car and began my drive to work this morning with a staunchly determined resignation: I was done with love.
Last night, after a terrible day and an all-around lackluster week plagued with the backdrop of my ever-tiresome luteal phase, I got on my knees by my bedside before God and pleaded with Him to rid me of the desire for romantic love. I feel utterly plagued by it, and not even my daydreams about it bring feelings of happiness or optimism about it anymore. Because once they are over, my mind comes back into focus or I wake up, and I am back in my semi-dull reality where love is so far away.
I often go back and forth with wanting to rid myself of the deeply foundational pull I have toward romance, love, and passion, and wanting to just accept it and let it move freely throughout my body and being. If I am intentional about ridding myself of that pull and letting it go, maybe I can be free of this suffering, this ache, and be at some kind of peace. If I let the yearning for love course throughout my veins with abandon, then it will become a permanent part of my subconscious, indistinguishable from the rest of me, and that love-soaked homeostasis will then (hopefully…) act as a magnet that attracts the love I’ve always dreamt about.
Although upon the start of this debate with myself, in the back of my mind *Carrie Bradshaw voice* I couldn’t help but wonder…what is it that I’m doing wrong in this regard? To go deeper, is my constant obsession about it the very thing that will be my Achilles heel in this arena?
The places in which I continually search for answers to these questions are empty and hollow. A childhood home and its inhabitants, plagued with self hatred. A new, “modern” society that thrives on confusion and toxic dissent; a confusing and never-ending maze, especially for an inexperienced girl like myself. Endless books, movies, articles, and anecdotes from my friends with more success in that department that just barely miss the point of satisfaction in my mind by a hair. There is always something missing, always some unanswered question that leaves me feeling like I have nothing but useless footnotes to forever sift through.
But upon some conversations with some great friends, I’ve come to a bit of a realization that I think has been beating up against my bird brain and its subconscious over the past…well, for as long as I can remember. This particular come-to-Jesus moment is what caused me to remove the former title of this post: I was *going* to call it, “I Am Done With Love”, and go on a whole rant about why I’m done with love and why it will never find me. I realized (after a few hearty car singalongs to Ethel Cain, Colbie Callait, and Amy Winehouse) how silly that is, and also thought about how crazy it is that, a lot of the time, the most complex questions have such simple answers. What’s arguably even crazier is that the advice we hate the most is often the most helpful to us. I used to hate it whenever people would say that the best way to attract love into yourself is to ~be yourself~ and that ~it happens when you least expect it~, but upon looking back at my life, I’ve realized that the moments where I’ve found the most success in terms of matters of the heart are when I aligned with these two principles. When I act in most alignment with myself in any given moment is when I manifest great things. {I know I kind of wrote about this in one of my recent Substacks, but dammit this was on my heart and mind today so don’t knock me for the repetition.}
I often try to force myself to turn cynical and cold so I can decenter men that way; but I'm realizing that I need to just center myself, and that the true essence OF myself is actually very kind and loving and open. Although my day to day temperament and actions may vary, at the core is that warm and loving energy that comes naturally to me, in both big and small ways. Why was I so blind to that, specifically to the fact that that is what draws people to me like magnets? Why did I not believe that I was enough, that that was not enough?
This also brings me to the other oft-repeated adage that one must love themselves before someone else can love them, or before they can love someone else. I still don’t particularly like that phrase, but there is truth to it – a very wise friend of mine discussed with me today how, ironically enough, heartbreak is what led her to come to the realization that even when she was her best, most authentic and most loving self, there was some man who just couldn’t meet the moment. And that said way more about him than it could ever possibly say about her. Reflecting on this on the heels of two very short lived relationships with varying levels of toxicity was unexpected, yet so very necessary. No matter how much I try to act cold and detached, I still tear up tremendously at the sight of a sunset or an eclipse, and I am utterly verklempt when the tearjerker part of any Disney or romance or bildungsroman movie comes onto the screen. I am a warm, loving, secretly happy lover girl through and through – there’s no running away from that. And I don’t know when or how, but it will serve me well in the future. No more begging on bended knee for God to remove love from my life? What kind of sense does that make?
I don’t have much else to say, but I’ll close with this “AHA moment” text I sent to my beloved girls’ chat this morning:
It's a little paradoxical, but you're "failures" in this respect may very well to the right person turn out to be what attracts them to you. There's nothing that can make a man feel more special than to be "the one" who holds the key that eluded so many others.
So much love for this 🤍