Let Love In

I’ve spent the majority of my life trying to figure out how to save the people around me. How I could become some sort of savior in the world. I grew up attached to the belief that my value in this world was tied to the value I could provide others. It sent me down a long road of perfectionism for most of my life. A trauma response that still knocks on my door most days if I’m being really honest. It earned me a PhD. It locked me into relationships that weren’t meant to last. It kept me in friendships well beyond their expiration dates. It kept me so far removed from parts of myself that desperately needed love and compassion. I was too scared to look at any part of myself or my life that didn’t qualify as perfect, so they would go untouched.

Over time it feels like the concept of life keeps getting simpler in my mind. Maybe instead of worrying our whole lives about how successful, impactful, studious, talented, beautiful, and perfect-on-paper we can be, our only real job is to feel it all. To be near it all. To be connected to the experience when everything in us is fighting to get as far away from it as possible. To know our own souls just a little bit more. To learn how to exist with the joy and the pain, both of which are wildly vulnerable. To learn how to sit in the darkness with as much peace and stillness as we feel when we bask in the light. To be fully surrendered to the human experience.

I set my word of intention for 2023 as love. What I didn’t initially understand about this year’s project was that it would need to be primarily an internal one. Don’t get me wrong, I want the outward expression of love to exist everywhere in my life, too. But I tend to look for ways to concretize my life. Steps. Fixes. Goals. Actionable items. Tangible measurables. So when I first set the intention, I made lists of all the ways I can “live in love” this year. I detailed all the plans I would make to embody love in my relationships, in my business, in my hobbies. I spent less time examining how I can live in love within myself than I did out in the world.

Definitions I found of to love, taken as a verb: To hold dear. To cherish. To desire actively. To take pleasure in. To thrive in.

I would add that to love may sometimes just mean to exist with. To be near to. To be present to. To surrender to.

This year I would love to live in love out in the world. To take pleasure and thrive in all the aspects of my life. To embody love in my family, my friendships, my hobbies, my business, and a potential relationship. And I will still spend some time focused in those interpretations of love. But the truth is that if I accomplish nothing more this year than to be closer to the difficult parts of my existence, to exist and find some sense of stillness on the days that feel the most excruciating, to find compassion for the parts of myself that are hardest to look at, to find more ways to care for my inner child, to find more peace in the darkness, that will be enough. It has to be. Our capacity to experience joy and fulfillment are directly proportional to our ability to be in the darkness. “Loving yourself” is made out to be a glamorous concept, but I think it’s actually gritty more often than it’s glamorous. I think loving yourself is bound to have more messy than perfect. Or perhaps messy is just perfect.

This year I would like to cultivate a deeper reverence for my life. I now realize that maybe the best way to do that is to do the more uncomfortable work of examining the ways I am pinching myself off from my own humanity.

Maybe 2023 is the year you too let go of having it “all together” all the time. Let go of what you think you “should” be doing to make your life look or feel or present a certain way. Maybe the most loving thing you could do for yourself is to just listen to what your heart is actually telling you. To get quiet and still enough for it to come through and be willing to listen when it does. Maybe this year you open your heart to let everything and everyone that needs access all the way in. Maybe that list needs to get smaller instead. Maybe this is the year you learn how to bravely share more of yourself with the world. Maybe you just learn how to more bravely witness yourself. Maybe this is the year you quit holding back and go all-in. On whatever it is.

This year let love in. Stay close to it all and it just might bust your heart all the way open.

Love y’all,

E.