love.

What a perfect day to talk about love.

Having spent the last 5 years living single, Valentine’s had generally become a holiday of dread to me. What I have come to realize this year is that such a feeling is completely unnecessary- and in fact not useful.

If I could sum up the difference between last year and now, it would be this: I learned to love myself.

We spend hours in the day as a society longing for the wrong kind of love. Love for family. Love for wealth. Love with a lifelong partner. Music and film have presented us since childhood with love. But as a romantic child always looking for the philosophy in things, I was always looking outside of myself for the answers. I never considered they existed in my own mind.

My childhood was spent absorbing. Learning about the relationships around me. Learning how I fit into them. After my first decade, I learned how I didn’t fit into all the relationships around me. Groups, cliques, friendships that lasted for or ended in a day. The flight of belonging and the desperation to grasp back on.

It wasn’t until my twenties that I was ready to date myself. I got to know who I was, tested the waters. I asked questions and tried on different hats (or careers or boyfriends). Heartbreak with men and women and family. I questioned my way through a neverending philosophy degree, then turned to personal development for the second half of this decade to learn the deeper side of what makes me ME.

But as I near the end of this era, I see that love is my next step. I have reached a point of acceptance for everything I am and all that I am not. It’s not second nature yet, but I am confident my thirties will help me get there.

This is what makes me see love and Valentine’s in a whole new light. Consumerism has convinced us that the holiday is about romance and sex. I see it now as a celebration of love. And love can come in any form, for any one. How we choose to experience our love on the one day devoted to it is exactly that- our choice.

I watched this video today, and I got it. These people were asked to focus on love- any kind, for any one- while in an MRI machine that evaluated their dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin levels. What caught my attention is how all of the contestants experienced an overwhelming sense of abundance after spending the time in that machine focussing only on love for a few minutes. 

I can't help but question; when was the last time you spent 5 minutes focussed on love in your life? Have you ever devoted time to thinking about loving you? If these people after 5 minutes of focussed thoughts on love could experience that high for other people and things, how would it affect your life to have those feelings of belief and acceptance for yourself?

However your Valentine’s turned out, ask yourself; what love did I neglect this year? What can I focus on differently? What do I take for granted? What am I grateful for? Take 5 minutes in your day to invest in love. Surely, it will repay you tenfold. 

Cleaning Out and Moving In

As I sit here and look at my life, I am amazed at how happy I am. My conception of ‘normal’ now is what most people would consider ‘overjoyed’. But it’s interesting what happens when you take the risky choices in life that have you doing what you want to do every day.

The level of development I have had over the last month is one completely new to me. All my life I let my perception of myself decide what I was capable of doing. Occasionally I would set a goal that was like throwing a hat over a wall and not knowing how to go get it- but the basic things in life always stayed the same to keep me feeling a sense of security.

So this year I did something different. I sat down with 3 friends I admire for their business savvy and personal strength, and hashed out my business with them. The business I hesitantly started because other people told me I was capable, even though I never believed it myself. Somehow having a support network of such amazing people became my sense of security- and all of the circumstances in my life were now free to play with and change. 

As if by magic, my life started to fall into place. In a way I never thought possible. And I realize every day that the only thing standing in my way this whole time was myself.

For 4 years I was in love. Like head-over-heels, couldn’t stop thinking about it kind of love. The lifestyle of this love was written all over my typed goals, and I accommodated all of my life’s plans around it. But what I came to realize this year is you can’t love something 30% and think it’s enough. When it comes to love, it’s all or nothing.

And so it’s no wonder I stayed single all these years- dabbling in the thought of a long-term relationship with some of the men I met, but never truly committing. I was in love with something else that left no room for life or men or personal goals. I was in love with my job.

I hear people talk about ending relationships for no real reason except that it’s not perfect, and I had experienced that to some extent with men, but never with a love like this one. Admitting that I didn’t want to be in the career I had worked toward for 4 years felt more like a breakup than anything I have ever felt before. And like so many downtown couples, I now am still living in the same space until I can find something more suited for me and move out.

But a funny thing happened as I started to let go of this big love in my life. An amazing man walked in. Like I always say, if you are still using old brain patterns, you can’t make new ones. Same goes for love, I guess. Our life is a space too small to fill up with the wrong things. Make a little room for the right ones, and they just show up.