happy valentines day you lovestruck fools

this one's for you Tanner <3

This month’s newsletter is dedicated to my childhood best friend Tanner, who spent 14 and a half years teaching me about love, and whose memory I will hold very dear to me for the rest of my life.

Rest easy old man, you did good, you were such a good boy.

Loss has a funny way of reminding us of love, doesn’t it?

And it is the month of love after all. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was born in February, it’s always felt like love and longing (the very basis of Valentine’s Day) were weaved into my DNA.

What better day is there to reflect on love?

I’m not talking purely about romantic love - I’m referring to it all. Love extends beyond romance, it blankets every relationship worth having, doesn’t it?

I’ll be honest, I spent a lot of time letting love leave me hardened, cruel even; mostly to myself.

I feared the very thing that I most desired.

If I’m being transparent, I approached most things in my life with this innate hardness, this toughness. I was afraid if anyone saw how soft and sensitive I really was it would be mistaken for weakness, that all the work I’d done to keep my head above water would crumble right in front of me.

I was so scared that my softness would be labelled weakness, so I packed it up and stored it so deep inside of me that I lost track of it altogether. It took many years to realise the opposite was true. My strength was in my compassion.

My friends were the first to teach me about the love that I was seeking. They picked me up when I fell, they held me when I cried, they cooked meals for me to eat when I could barely get out of bed, they cleaned my house when I didn’t have the energy to do it myself.

They kept showing up in my lowest moments. They kept loving me when I felt the least lovable, and I’ll spend the rest of my life grateful for the unconditional love my friends have given me. They are the first ones who taught me how soft love should be, how beautiful it was meant to be.

And let me just say, that when I finally got my chance and I stumbled upon a love that let me lean into my softness, it felt like returning home. I felt more myself than I ever did.

It reminded me I was always this soft. I was always this way, I just spent years hiding it, scared it would be taken advantage of yet again.

It is scary to bare yourself to someone, to show them the deepest parts of yourself and hope they choose to love you still. But there is no love without risk, there is no love without honesty, there is no love without bravery.

It is never easy, but it is necessary.

And I’ve learned that love always finds you when you need it: romantic, platonic, familial. It shows up just when you need it most, it helps guide the way, a hand to hold amidst a storm.

Here’s a little secret, just between us hopeless romantics - love stays with us forever. So if you’re scared of love because of the possibility of its absence, let me reassure you: love always persists, sometimes disguised as grief, other times as anger, maybe even annoyance. But it persists.

You will make promises you will break, you will hold hands that will eventually let you go, and you will bandage up your heart a million times. And then you’ll keep going, and love will find you again, and each time it will be a different type of love, and you’ll realize all the love you’ve left behind long ago still lingers in you.

When love leaves, it leaves all the good of it behind, I promise you that. I promise.

It took me a long time to realize that all the softness, compassion, and love that exists inside me is only able to prosper and extend beyond myself because it knows the darkest parts of me. It knows the depths of my Self. It’s seen and caressed all the parts of my Self that I spent years hating.

I am soft and loving and kind because I have sat in cruelty and darkness and made it out alive. I have known violence, I know how wicked of a creature I, and others, can be.

And every day I wake up and choose not to be so tough anymore. I choose to be kind, even during moments when my instincts try to force me to bear my fangs.

It is a much harder feat to approach life from this angle, every day I fight against myself, but the fight has gotten easier.

I want to be good. I want to be kind. And I never realized how much work went into a promise like that. It is not always easy to remain kind and loving in the wake of anger or injustice.

But I am here, and I am kind, and I will fight against myself every day to keep it that way.

So let me say this: it is much harder to be kind in the face of situations that try to force you toward violence. It is hard to choose to be kind and loving and caring. It is a silent strength, one I’m trying my best to train.

There are still days I mess up, when I make mistakes, when I let my rage take over. But on those days all I can do is take accountability, accept my consequences, and try to be better tomorrow.

All of this is to say that today is all about love, but so is every day, so is our entire existence really. And you have got to start loving without thinking the other shoe is going to drop, you have got to start to find love in the mundane.

Here’s a challenge for you: try to find a little bit of love in every day, even if it’s just a second of it, a millisecond.

Find a little sliver of love every day, it makes living easier, softer.

I don’t know if I’m all that qualified to give you advice about love, I’m still figuring out the basics myself.

But, I guess what I can say is that the thing about love is it shows you all the parts of yourself you don’t think are worthy of it. It has a funny way of bringing up our oldest, most painful wounds.

I spent a lot of my youth running from any sort of meaningful love (both romantic and platonic) because I knew I would have to expose myself, darkness and all, and it felt safer to keep all that inside than let it pour out me.

So, my advice on this glorious love day is this: do it scared, be brave enough to love even when you’re terrified.

Usually, I like to share something fun here, but this month I’ll let this be a space for the grief I feel after losing my childhood companion. There’s nothing quite like losing a pet, it’s a different type of loss, a different type of grief.

But man. What a gift, to be given such unconditional love and loyalty.

It’s a grief I hope I get to carry forever, as a reminder of our time together, a reminder of the little girl I was when we met, and the woman I’ve become as he’s left.

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I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this month’s edition of Confessions of a 20-Something. I encourage you to share this with your close friends if you feel like it’s the kind of thing they’d be into.

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Until next month …