What is love?
I hoard notebooks. I keep every notebook I’ve ever inscribed and have piles of coil notebooks from various epochs of my life like cairns of foregone thought. In a pale blue notebook embossed with delicate birds, I stumbled upon a gem from my childhood.
I was 8 years old pontificating about what I thought about love.
In childish scrawl, I theorised if soul mates could be true, what to look for in love and how to know it was love. Wildly romantic, I fantasised about the stories I heard about Prince Charming’s, happily ever after’s and the love stories I saw around me.
In this particular notebook, I wrote page after page about how love would feel like coming home. I envisioned love feeling like walking into a spacious, familiar, cosy home - lit dimly with the dancing flame of candlelight, echoes only of the crackling fire. I thought love would feel like a deep sigh of relief, an involuntary softening, settling into a wingback chair, perfectly formed to me. I pictured love as relaxation, to rest my feet in front of the warm hearth, accompanied by a sleeping dog curled comfortably on a woven rug.
Love was a surrender into present contentment, full of somatic and sensory softness. At 8 years old, I had never sat in front of a crackling fire in a wingback chair in a candlelit room with a dog curled at my feet - but I knew what that could feel like. It was relaxed, soft.
Love was coming home to yourself and sharing that home with another.
But the word love is somewhat of a misnomer - it utterly pales in comparison to the depth and breadth of what love is. What we conceive of in love often first implies romance but there are countless types of love we get to share.
We say we love our pets, the mountains, family, partner and pasta all with the same four letter word.
But if love is coming home (according to my younger self), I have experienced that unmistakable sensation in friendships that offer unconditional love, alongside gentle challenges and that incredible mix of admiration, respect and pride in which we love friends. I’ve experienced that love with my work itself, to feel like the work I get to do is a familiar hearth to warm myself by.
I have geysers of gratitude for the love we get to share in life. For friends who feel like family. For family learning to accept themselves in you. For relationships that begin and end in serendipitous ways that inevitably teach you more about who you thought you were than you could have anticipated.
I have loved and have learned to allow myself to be loved in many ways. And it requires softness.
I experienced this feeling of coming HOME most potently with myself. There isn’t one moment that singularly reflects this notion but rather, a compilation of many moments in time that I felt the metaphor of sitting comfortably in front of the fire come alive. I was alive - truly happy. Those are the moments that slowly built self-love; it didn’t arrive in a moment of transcendence but was created with intention.
I had to prove to myself (and myself alone) that I was worthy of the love I thought I deserved. I had to prove to myself (and myself alone) that I was worthy of the protection, guidance, nurturance and care I was so quick to give others. I came home to myself with trepidation, in the smallest of baby steps learning to choose myself and gifting myself self-compassion along the way.
Self-love felt like an existential exhale.
Stepping into the softly lit room was the beginning of accepting the traits long hidden away. Settling into the wingback chair was creating space for myself in the everyday moments - gifting myself the first and last fruits of each day, even for only five minutes. Curling up to the fire to rest my feet was choosing to let go of the expectations that had long exhausted me. The dog curled comfortably on the woven rug was listening to my own intuition and trusting my instinct. And this whole scene is the outcome of giving myself permission to be soft, of believing I deserved to feel truly alive and happy in my life.
I don’t know if RuPaul is right when they say, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else” - surely giving love to another cannot be wholly contingent upon self-love, but it is pretty close.
I think we can and should work towards the Both-And: to strive to love ourselves with compassion and gentleness and also practise relaxing into the various forms of love in our life.