I Would Rather Be In Bed

Lost love seems like the chronic human condition.

As long as people have possessed the ability there have been stories written about love lost, love forgotten, and love achieved. It seems the penultimate life achievement. Love. Perhaps, that is why it is so difficult.

It’s been on my mind heavily recently.

Honestly, because I’ve recently lost mine. It hasn’t been misplaced, simply slipped away in the night. Perhaps no more or less dramatic than that. However, it made me think, while my partner has recently left, I’ve lost many other loves recently as well. By recently I could mean as nearly as a few months to a couple years, my sense of time is as exact fisherman are in determining the size of their most recent catch.

Other loves I’ve lost recently are myself love, my love of life, my love of my career, my love and satisfaction of what I’ve achieved in life… and I wonder, are any of those any more or less significant? Are any of those a direct cause of the others? How can one ever know?

It brought me to another thought.

Why, oh why, is love so…hard?

You always hear the same old moniker…love is work! It’s not like the movies!

Yes, Brenda, we get it. Here’s the thing though, there are true selfless, unconditional loves in this world. At least for me. The love for my children is absolutely unconditional. I like to think I’m all tough love and bravado, but the truth is, my children could drag me through the emotional depths of hell and back and through again and I’d drag them back every time.

Every. Time.

They are the absolute loves of my life and they’ve been the solid rocks of my foundation which have brought me through every hard moment of my life. They’ve been my guiding light that have dragged me through every moment when I wanted to give up. They know none of this, but it makes them no less precious to me. For that, I would move the very orbit of this earth for them if that’s what they needed. There are no exceptions.

The other love of my life that comes with no exceptions is my animals. Some may stop and roll their eyes at this but to them I say, not all would say the same. They bring me joy and comfort and there is no battle I would not fight for them as they are powerless to fight most of them for themselves and I feel no shame for that. My cats snuggle down with me at night to sleep and my dogs are literally excited I exist every second of the day. No other being on earth can say the same.

However, every single other love in our lives comes with conditions. Period. Even the love we carry for ourselves. For life. For our partners.

Am I saying that’s a bad thing? No. We cannot be a dumping ground for endless wrongdoing and pain. That would be a betrayal to ourselves.

However, a condition to our own self love? Only when we are skinny enough, smart enough, fast enough, GOOD ENOUGH. But only we determine when that is so we can change the bar whenever we want always giving ourselves an impossible standard to meet. When will you quit grading on a downward curve? Yourself should be another love we give without condition. We are absolutely a product of being human. Give yourself forgiveness often and freely for the times you didn’t know better. For the times you did, and you messed up anyways. For the times you couldn’t be bigger than your trauma. For the times the hard days won. Love yourself. When you’re thin, when you’re not. When you said something smart, when you didn’t. When you said something mean, when you didn’t but you apologized. Every version of you is beautiful and perfect in its imperfections.

I find the imperfect people who accept themselves so beautiful. So wonderful. Mess up, do better, move on. Quit hurting yourself. Let’s love ourselves and have a great story to tell instead!

Life. Oh man, it’s been insane, hasn’t it? Just absolutely bonkers. I had such a long period where I absolutely just hated it. I had a long period where I just didn’t want to be here. I didn’t necessarily want to kill myself, but I was in a very dark place and if I didn’t wake up one day that would have been ok with me. Now days, I’m exhausted most days, I’m back to being a single mom, working overtime most weeks, scrambling like mad. But. I have my kids, I have my dogs, I have LIFE. I get to read amazing books, have experiences, I have a cruise booked…I have peace. Do I LOVE my job? No. Does it get me what I need? Yes. Can I get through it with minimal suffering to do that? Sure can. I work to live. And I got a lot of living left to do.

It’s strange how when you mention love most people think of the person, you’re in a relationship with. To me, I may have lost that, and that saddens me greatly. But I’ve found so much love this year that’d I’d lost, and I didn’t think I’d find again. Love comes in so many forms. And I don’t think we give ourselves enough of it.

Always love. There’s so much to be had.