In a Nutshell, It's All About This
Love
Hello,
It’s Sunita here.
I often think about love.
I wonder why it is so hard for us to accept the fact that above all, we deeply crave love?
Maybe because inside us we know that love is so deeply essential to our survival, that the thought of not having it is too painful to process.
Then there is the risk of being rejected when we express our love to others.
We fell eviscerated when we do not receive it in return.
Maybe we choose to downgrade, or dismiss our need for love because the feelings of rejection, deprivation and exclusion we experience when our desire for connection is not reciprocated are so painful.
Maybe we did not get loved as infants and children in the ways we needed. We got so wounded and messed up internally that we started believing we were unlovable. Maybe we said to ourselves, “I’ll show them!” and started on a path that required us to minimize love. “I don’t need anyone!.”
Love is certainly a high stakes game!
Maybe we believe we don’t have the chops to play it.
Maybe we have difficulty accessing the fierceness required to experience this intense and vivid feeling.
Maybe we mistake the necessary surrender to love as a giving up of our self.
I often also think about the culturally promoted, narrow, idealizing, inaccurate, and incomplete narratives about love. Instead of making us feel whole, they actually cheat us from experiencing more genuine love in life.
Maybe the heavy social push of romantic love being the most desirable love to be in, in many ways precludes us of all the other precious forms of love we can experience in our lifetime.
Maybe we actually have love for those who we say we like, respect, admire, and have high regard for.
Maybe friendship, collaboration, comradeship, teaching, coaching, helping, serving, consulting and mentoring are all camouflaged ways of loving others.
Maybe love isn’t about finding a tidy happily ever after with another person because it only exists in the affirmation we find in each other, in spite of our conflicts, messiness and imperfection.
Maybe the love we feel for an author (past or present), activist, or artist whose work inspires us is just as important to our wellbeing as the love we experience with our real life friends. Does our internal world differentiate the love we feel for such ‘friends from afar’ from our ‘real life friends’?
Maybe we are just not good at recognizing and feeling the love that others have for us.
Maybe we are too scared to acknowledge, even to ourselves, the love we have for others.
I don’t blame us.
Being vulnerable is a way of being we are not usually instructed in, or see role modeled enough by powerful and successful individuals in a society that is set up to reward the illusion of independence and strength. So we maladapt in a plethora of ways to avoid openness, a pre requisite for the experience of deep love.
The perceived, or real risk of getting hurt when we offer our heart to another is terrifying. The fear of rejection paralyses us. The grave problem with the numbness and debilitation resulting from this paralysis is that it leads us farther away from what is so essential and interwoven to our survival.
Love is essential to our survival. There is power in this truth.
Our strength lies in our vulnerability. There is power in this truth.
Love is the purpose of us being here. There is power in this truth.
In a nutshell, it’s all about love. There is power in this truth.
So, here’s to love!
Because what else is there to talk about?
THE END
I die
When I
Don’t love.
It’s a deeper death
Than when I will
Cease breathing.
It’s a sadder death
Than when I will
Be mourned.
It’s a more final death
Than when I will
Be recast into ashes.
I die
When I
Don’t love.
“The End” is poem #11 from ‘PERMISSION- For Me To Fall In Love’, which is my second collection in The Anthology, The Way Back Home
The first collection, ‘STRIPPING- My Fight to Find Me’ is available to read in print and as narrated by me on Audible.
Until next time,
Moving forwards,
Sunita