for you, valentine
Originally published at Examorata. Please leave any comments there.
Another year, another love letter. For the past few years, I’ve written about different kinds of love for Valentine’s Day - love for friends, love for humanity in general, love for family. I’ve had the great good fortune to work on lots of things I love lately, experiencing love in many ways - love for story and storytelling, which I promise to get back to writing about one of these days. Love for music and creating music, and the community that creates as well. Love for my fantastic friends as our lives keep growing in amazing directions.
Still and all, I think maybe it’s time to set those worthy loves aside for a moment. It’s time to take up a love letter to someone else, because without this person I don’t think I would be as good at seeing the other ways love touches my life.
It’s about time I wrote a love letter for myself. It would be easy to focus on the last year or two, when I was in therapy, then out of it, when I was going through massive changes beyond my control, when I was thankful for my ability to handle them, when something happened that finally let me kick-start myself and my life in a newer, more true direction.
That would be the easy part of the letter. The hard part goes back many more years. A shy kid, a fat kid, a kid who didn’t know how to talk to people, a kid with glasses (first in my class!), a kid with buck teeth. An insecure teenager, a walking superiority complex disguising a rather profound lack of self-knowledge, a complainer, a smartass. A confused young woman, a glosser-over of problems, a user of humor as a shield and sword, a person who honestly could not stand to look at herself in a mirror sometimes.
How to write the letter to all I used to be, to what formed who I am? It’s not like I have answers now, not like I could send back a comforting little letter to me at, say, 15 and say “Don’t sweat it, by the time you’re 38 you’re gonna have this knocked.” Maybe the answer really does come back to who I am now.
Whatever I did in the past that did not feel beautiful, the actions born of pain, fear, insecurity, still didn’t essentially change me at the core. A caring kid, a loving kid, a smart and sharing kid. A curious teenager, an explorer, a thought-experimenter, and an entertaining, fun person to be around. An earnest young woman, ready to believe the best in people, someone who would give the best of herself to the people she cares for.
Every day, every moment, is full and fraught with the potential for success or failure, happy or sad, the selfless choice and the selfish, the helping and the hurtful. And for every single one of us, our lives will be full of all of those things, from all those moments. Focusing on the times I made the bad choices is unfair, because I made good ones too. Many of them. With grace, with continued love, I aim to keep making more and more good choices. For finally, finally, I trust myself fully to do so.
Honestly though, I’m not going to buy myself a stuffed animal or any flowers this year. That just seems so cliche. Maybe I’ll bake myself something, or surprise myself with a favorite movie! More likely I’ll just enjoy downtime with one of my favorite people. No pink hearts required.