Loops and Loops of Love or Pain
Life is short, love yourself. Take out that pipe, but don't smoke crack. If you’re feeling it, run away somewhere very far. The further you go, the closer to yourself you’ll need to be.
My friend smoked crack the other day. She made a few bad friends; made a few bad choices. They got high, got in a car, crashed it, and ran away.
Like I said, bad choices.
My friend was sexually abused as a kid. She was sexually abused and then sexually abused another kid, when she was a kid. Now, she’s grown up, has her own home, and can’t let go. She can’t run away from herself. I’ve spoken to her when she was laughing, when she was on top of the world, and she’s said she feels the same. “Life is shit, life is shit, life is shit,” she’d told me. In her mind, life is shit.
My friend is surrounded by friends (okay, bad ones), she’s surrounded by family. She has a job and sometimes, she travels. She even has a side business: my friend sells edibles. She checks all the boxes and has so much “potential”. She’s funny and cute and so damn charming. People want to be around her all the time. And, she barely feels loved.
Life gives her feedback. She gets promotions at work and gets paid more than everyone else. She’s become a mini celebrity because of her business; everyone wants to be around her. People like me try to make her feel special. We buy her stuff, take her out. Text her randomly about how much we love her. Sometimes, my friend realizes her luck - luck she’s created - and randomly, she’s hit by a wall of memories she can’t climb out of.
Her memories trigger pain. Her pain creates loops of more pain. Loops and loops, it takes the strongest of us to break. She is strong. But maybe, there’s a number of cycles of loops we must go through before smashing the biggest loop into teen tiny pieces. Until then, she’s out there every day making new loops and they’re not fruit loops.
I had a dream a few months ago. Maybe it was about myself. Maybe it was about her. I was on an expedition, going around the world. Everywhere I went, I was searching for one thing: I was searching for how to feel loved. I went here and there and experienced everything I could in a multitude of places. I didn’t find love.
I woke up, I thought about it. It made sense. We can be told we’re loved, shown we’re loved, but we cannot be loved if we don’t feel loved. We can bathe in profound feelings and not feel a drop. Our faces can be smashed into a pile of glittery love and when we get up, none of that glitter is inside. How do we put it inside? How do we feel love?
If you came here looking for answers, the very best I’ll be able to provide you is hints. Little cherries I’ve picked up by speaking and asking everybody about love. I don’t really know. If I knew, I would tell my friend. I would tell my family. I would tell everybody until they believed it. I can only write about what I’ve experienced and here’s what I know so far:
Shut up and love yourself. Separate yourself from yourself and then treat yourself to everything you’d do to someone you love. Go to the gym, eat good food. Have fun in life; if you pass by a park, go swing the swings. We’re all going to die so soon, remember to live a little. Remember to feel alive.
When I’m in bed and alone, I close my eyes and imagine a hug. I feel arms around me and feel so tight and safe. I remind myself that I’m giving my own hug. That’s me I feel, and that’s powerful. If this is a little too “woo woo” for you, try something else. Look at how others give others love. Buy yourself an artisanal chocolate bar. Book yourself a hotel room. You don’t need an excess, you just need some self-directed love.
Try this for a day. Try this for a week, a month, a year. And then go back into your memories, reflect on how you felt before. Only then you’ll know if this is true, if this will change a thing. The only choice most of us have is to try.
I bought my friend a ticket to Brussels and told her to visit. I can’t make her feel loved. I can try and show her how to love herself. I don’t know the next thing about smoking crack; I’ve only heard that it makes you feel really, really loved. If that’s true it all makes sense. I know why my friend did that, and maybe there’s a chance to replace it with something else. Maybe there’s a chance before crack becomes a new loop, making more loops of senseless, looping pain.
A friend of mine who is a meditation teacher talks about the willingness to sit and be with ourselves as a way to "unwind the harshness" as he put it. I kept repeating that phrase after I read it. Unwind the harshness. For some reason it spoke to me, and I'm reminded of it here with your description of the loop-fest we all find ourselves tangled within. The older I get I start to see that the problem I've been trying to solve, "How to let the love in," was backwards. It's so hard to see, but in reality, it's my hesitancy, inability, or fear of letting the love OUT that causes me the most pain. I'm in a loop of withholding and self-protection, and it's not until I unwind the heart-bindings and allow the love out that I can actually see it has been there, inside all along. Your love leaks out more easily than mine. You give to friends and strangers and you share the shining gems of your dreams and experiences in your writing. And your friend is lucky that you're standing by, demonstrating the secret of knowing what love is by giving of yourself. And one day, when you and she least expect it, she'll probably buy a friend a ticket to go to Brussels.
Beautiful and best, Yehudis. Your emotions flow through your writing style so smoothly that it also flowed through me.