on love and faith.

I've always been an open person. I wore my emotions on my sleeve, even when I thought I was good at hiding it. On a more selfish level, I enjoyed the attention too. Well, the pity and attention, which is a weird thing to admit but can you blame me for liking the feeling of… being someone's center of attention? If there is one thing that I've always craved, it's been attention. And in letting people into my life, there's a need for faith too. I enjoy feeling loved and I enjoy letting people know things.

Let's get back to that word. Love is such a term for me, which you'll find in my previous blogpost has been explored in intense depth. What I want, really, is for people to percieve me and for people to understand me, which is quite easy when you spend so goddamn long thinking about yourself. Am I vain in that sense? Gosh, I never thought of myself as vain, but I think this is vanity. (I do spend hours in front of a mirror trying to look pretty… wow. Lots to be found out when you do things like start a fucking blog, huh?)

Anyhow, this blogpost kinda is just me talking about the concept of having faith in people, which I've been doing quite a bit recently. This blog in it of itself is relying on having faith that the 2 people that might actually read this will not be rude to me. Faith is such a funny thing to me, because it's just a sort of blind optimism that things will work out. And, trust me, I am no stranger to the cruel and harsh realities of this world, but also there's like 2 people ever that will read this, and I am no fool. I know my importance on the World Wide Web and it surely is no issue if I waffle endlessly about my feelings.

I know a lot of people, I stay in contact with lots of people and the thing is, and I have faith that when time comes, they will treat me well and if not, they will if we talk. Gosh, I sound like such a blind optimist when I speak like this, but the thing is leaving is so so incredibly easy. It's quite easy to say goodbye to someone because I lost faith in their care for me, they may remember me, they may not. That's okay, if they remember me I hope they remember how honest I was with them.

I think at heart, all of this comes from me being an ENFP 7w6. Joke, lol, it comes from me being kind of tired of hiding things all the time, you know? I don't wanna spend my life scared to be myself and I just want to be loved for me. I've been "loved" in the past, with people in love with the perception of me. But also, I'm young, so maybe I'm just stupid. Having all this blind faith… but what's the harm in having your heart broken if that means at least you bared your heart?

Ah, so much waffling and words to say I do love to be a bit vain.

defining love.

Love has been defined as many things by many people. Thousands of artists have all asked the question of what “love” is, as nebulous and abstract as the concept is. Philosophers have debated on the topic of love, artists have sung millions of songs about it. Mathematicians even deal with the concept of love and creation when it comes to theoretical physics. I’ve spent hours sitting alone in my head thinking about the concept of love, what it means to me and how it relates to feeling human. How it relates to emotions- to feeling. There is an intrinsic human desire for many to love and feel loved, there’s a human desire to feel connected. Yet for many this desire does not exist or may exist in a different form. This concept of love has plagued me and people I talk to about this for years and only now do I feel I have a grasp about how I feel and how I express this. This essay will cover a large range of topics from media I’ve consumed that expresses love and care to people I’ve talked to. Labels, aromanticism, trauma, media, emotions– all of it in a way wanting to answer a very personal question. What does love mean? Not for everyone but maybe just for me.

Love is such a broad concept that I do not think I can define love for everyone. I can’t even define it for myself so to try and tackle the task of what love means would be akin to Sispyhus pushing his boulder. One step forward and three steps back. I will focus on my own personal relationship with love and how society views it as a concept, what it means for others and the ways I’ve consumed the concept of love throughout my life through media. Finally, I will end it by talking about my future and how the concept of love will fit into that.

One thing about me I’m unfortunately, incredibly self aware of my own flaws and issues and will spend hours writing things like this about myself, which is self centered, I’m aware, but it makes me a better person in the end. Who’s to say? However, despite the hours spent reflecting on what it means to be me, I still don’t fully know. But that doesn’t mean I can’t at least try, right? Love has been a topic that’s vexed me for years. What does it mean to love when you have been refused love for most of your life? When you were never held close and told I love you by a parent. Having never loved makes things difficult, but not impossible.

The show Violet Evergarden follows our title character as she figures out what love means to her. She has spent all her life being unemotional and empty to the point where she cannot understand love as a concept and watching this show has been one of the most emotional experiences of my life. Watching someone stumble through life, talking and expressing others’ emotions in hope to express her own. She is not villainized for this inability to express her thoughts but rather respected and allowed to come to her own conclusion. The concept of the show is that she is a letter writer, she is forced to write down the stories of others in hopes to express but a minute amount of what her client wants to say– and as a writer who explores a lot of emotional topics, this show resonates for obvious reasons. I have spent the last 10 years of my life writing poems and songs and ballads and stories that attempt to express even a little bit of the raw vulnerability that comes with humanity… and through these years of practice and storytelling have I been able to come to some kind of… rough approximation of what I believe love is. The issue for me, is I either feel so deeply it eats me alive, or feel nothing at all that it makes me empty. For a few months, I felt so little I feared I’d never felt at all. But, as things came and went, I realized what was really happening. The issue I find myself having is that I feel so deeply. I spend hours feeling emotions that are swinging left and right, and Love is affected by these rapidly switching emotions. All this pretext and yet I haven’t defined what Love is.

Revolutionary Girl Utena’s version of love is a devotion, much like how I feel. Utena starts the show wanting to save and fix Anthy, but then she realizes this wanting to save and fix someone is yet another form of control. Anthy isn’t a person in the usual sense, she is subservient to whoever “owns” her and when Utena “owns” the Rose Bride, Anthy becomes a person for Utena, and not for herself. It’s only upon losing Anthy that Utena realizes what she’s done, and then she learns what love is. Anthy loves Utena because she let Anthy be a person. Utena loves Anthy because Utena can serve and protect her, yet they both understand that Anthy doesn’t need to be protected, but Anthy lets Utena be as devoted. Because that’s how Utena loves. For her, it’s also obsessive and comes from a place of wanting to serve the person that you love dearly, and upon seeing my own behavior reflected on Utena, I begun to figure out what I found love to be.

Love has become a nebulous term that’s barely a word anymore. I love you, I love this, I love that, it’s become null and void in most everyday conversation. Unless you are a pretentious artist who does nothing but write about their emotions. Love has become more of the actions than the feelings for me, because I express such a large part of my Love that I want to do nothing but act on what I impulsively feel.

Love is when I want to spend long amounts of time with someone. But not in the normal way, but rather I find myself wanting to dissect and pick apart what makes them tick. What they love, what they hate, I find myself wanting to know them better than they know themselves so that they can rely on me. I find myself wanting to be there and hold them, and make them better and in turn they make me better. I want to write them into my poems and stories, names and characters that are like them and I wrote inspired by them.

Love, to me, is the obsession that eats me alive– in a sense, they become part of me and in turn, my art. My Love is obsessive, I understand that, but I don’t think the obsession is necessarily a bad thing. It can become bad, but it can be… nice for some people to know there’s someone who loves them so dearly they want to be that close. Love is the feeling of devotion even once the honeymoon phase has ended. Love is the want to do everything for them. Love is spiraling and sickening and painful and obsessive for me, it’s something I fall deeper and deeper into until I’ve connected as much as I can.

Unfortunately, for me, I’ve never stuck around someone long enough to Love as deeply as I feel like I do now. The friends and lovers I’ve had in the past never let me past the initial surface level friendship phases. Yet, as I grow closer to the people I care about now, I understand more and more about these rickety feelings.

Love… hurts a lot. My life has been defined by an empty void caused by loss. My mother, my father, parental figures, friends, more exes than I’d like to admit. I never loved any of them, I wasn’t able to, yet part of me craved that deep connection. That promise of “You can’t get rid of me, and if you somehow do, I will keep trying” is something I’ve never been able to tell people. Mostly because they do leave, and sometimes I was the one who left, and I didn’t keep trying. Chasing someone to the ends of the Earth is quite literally something I’d do for anyone I love. Yet, this isn’t love, is it? Not in the usual sense, no. I don’t get those butterfly feelings (everyday is the honeymoon phase if I’m able to Love someone). I don’t think this is what people think when they think of Loving your Friends or Loving your Partner. Its an eternal honeymoon phase for me, and I wish this wasn’t the way I am, but I don’t know if this is something that can change for me. I feel too much it’s dehabiltating at times (mood stabilizers arc when??) and that includes my Love.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t get better. That brings me to my conclusion: what does love mean to me? My love is defined by devotion, and I have never been able to devote until now. I find myself wanting to be close and yearn for that human touch. I want to find people I care about and I want to see them smile, I want to help. Being with people brings me a satisfaction that I will never be able to describe but nonetheless feel. Despite it all, I think that even this isn’t a good reflection of what love is to me. But it's an approximation, and it’s enough.