Right, it seems like an easy word. It's an easy concept, a no-brainer. You love your spouse/partner. You love your family. You love your friends. You love that new greek yogurt with the honey in it. You love that purse with the little gold lock and key charm? So cute! You love baseball. You love Fridays!
Lao Tzu says "Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." Love is a risk - it's reaching out in the darkness and hoping to find something you've lost, something you've always lost, and not things that bite and crawl. It's painful to love because when you love with your whole heart and your whole being, you're not reserving a core deep in you that is immune to pain. And so the exercise of practicing love in full form takes courage, and it builds courage. And when you are loved deeply, you are stronger and you feel more capable of facing tasks that require great strength of spirit, great courage.
So love begets love in this way. Being loved gives you the courage to love more. And when you love it's not a limited resource. My husband Aaron is my partner. He's my other half - literally. I'm creative and big ideas and flash and scattered and wow! He's follow-through and planning and diligent and thorough. When I am weak he is strong. When I am flying in the clouds he holds a ribbon I can follow back home. When he is down I am solid. We complement each other and we are polar opposites - ENFP and ISTJ. We are opposites in everything, even what drives us. But we need each other because we love each other, we don't love each other because we need each other. And because we have this love that begets courage and strength while taking courage and strength, we have more love to share. I believe he has taught me what the face of love looks like, and that I have helped him learn the same.
I had to unlearn some bad things about love and it took me more than 20 years. When I was young, ten, one of my abusers told me that all they did to me was because he loved me. He told me under trees in my backyard, a lover's pair, that wound their top limbs around each other and bore tart cherries. I thought that was love then, and I hated it. I wanted no part of it. I knew my parents loved me and I loved them, but it was different somehow - I thought that what he said was truth - love makes you hurt people and make them dead inside. Why would I ever want to love anyone? The two years I spent being abused left me with PTSD, which I would eventually realize when I was about 30 years old. It goes hand-in-hand with the bipolar disorder, you see.
When I went into my first consensual relationship I was 18. I had met a boy, Christoph, while doing a summer job. We worked together and we went out after work one day and I thought hey, he's cute, this is fun, why not? So we dated for the summer and it was very much like being a wobbly-legged puppy. I wasn't sure what to do and I didn't even feel really like I could stand on my own two feet in any sense of the word.
In high school, I was not the girl that boys wanted to date. At the time I thought it was because I was fat and ugly and I wore big glasses and I was brilliant and they hated nerds. I don't think that was it - I think I lacked a critical confidence. I think I gave off a distinct "NO" vibe, and in retrospect, I'm very glad of it. I was really not ready for any sort of relationship.
The best thing about my relationship with Christoph was I felt like someone found me fascinating and beautiful for the first time in my life. I felt powerful. I had never felt powerful before. It's intoxicating. We broke up because we were going to different schools and we knew we'd want to date other people and it was entirely good-natured and really a good experience after all. In college, I recaptured that sense of power repeatedly. I would only be interested in a boy or a girl for a time, and once I realized I had power, I was done with it. That was my mindset - I didn't want anything that made me feel like I was not the one in absolute control of everything. But when I was in absolute control, I would be bored. Sometimes I would weep for no reason. Sometimes sex would make me sob.
Then I met my ex-husband in person and I didn't feel in control. I felt cared for and kept safe. My abusers, I knew they would be able to find me. In my head, that was always part of my drive to get away. And so I moved halfway across the country to keep me safe, and I knew Jay would take care of me and pet me and love me, and I was so in love with that idea. I wanted to be safe. And for a time, i was very happy being safe but as I started to grow up and have more and more experiences with life, I realized that safe and secure does not always equal the happy and fulfilled path. We had two children together and I love my daughters.
I think my love for Anna was my first ever experience with what love really is and really should be. It was terrifying in its intensity. It had a complete lack of selfishness in it. Love for me, before, had always been ultimately about me. I was very dramatic and if people loved me and I them, it was sort of part of my story. I love stories, and I've told you I'm a storyteller. Love makes for a good story, right? Dramatic things, clashes between desires, all excellent plot material and good experiences. But here was Anna, this small baby, and she had delicate long fingers - which she uses now to play the violin and to write and to craft her own stories. She had my eyes. She had such soft, thin skin. I felt love like I didn't even know it existed at that point. And it was terrifying - wasn't love, hadn't I learned, that love meant you hurt people?
But that couldn't be and I knew it wasn't true. Then Julia came and the love I felt for her was the same intensity, the same type of not-selfish drive to love and protect. She was so tiny, born so early, and she knew nothing of anything except those close to her, mother, father, sister. As babies my daughters both exhibited bits of their personalities they retain to this day - Anna never wanted to be swaddled. She wanted to experience the world with her hands and eyes and legs and moving and not contained. She is very much the independent child. Julia loved swaddling, wanted to live in my sling and be held constantly, and she still delights in curling up in a lap and snuggling and loving the world from a position of comfort.
So I experienced love for the first time with those two girls and then my life changed. I started loving things. I loved myself, and that was difficult. For a long time, I had regarded myself as a stumbling block to being a perfect fairy tale. I wanted myself to be different - I would try to will myself to fit the role I had defined for myself. I willed myself to fit a stay at home mother. I willed myself to fit a wife. I willed myself to fit a glamorous sophisticated actress. I willed myself to have others perceive me as kind and loving (but I was so afraid to love!) I willed myself to fit a business-woman. And in truth, I am a mother, I am a wife, I am dramatic - but the thing was that I had defined ideas of what things WERE and I made myself fit them. I gave that up as time went on. I willed myself to fit a poet's dress and took my MFA, but eventually, after therapy and diagnosis and everything after, I stopped willing myself to fit anything.
It was time to stop willing and to figure out who I am. I had to find myself in all that- and all of that was part of PTSD. What shook out was me, and sometimes little bits I didn't know continue to shake out. I love my friends without reserve, and I love my husband without reserve, and I love the people I work with and the clients we serve. I've started to make love my mainstay, and to approach people with love and an open mind and an open heart. It's really hard! Sometimes it hurts and feels very stabby, but I have to do it. It's who I am.
Love isn't something you are forced into with tart cherries in your mouth instead of sweet summer plums. Love is hard to learn but easy to practice. It leaves you open and wound-able but more complete and more full. I wouldn't go back to being any of the people I was in my past - but I wish I could have taught myself love at a younger age. I'm thankful for my children and my patient friends and husband, because I'm a practitioner of love and sometimes I make mistakes. But that's all for the better. Love is what you reach into the darkness hoping to find, and love is what enables you to reach through the darkness. Love doesn't let you "fix broken people" - but it lets you hold their hand and walk next to them while you can, and let them know you are there. You are present. They are loved.
Sometimes it's not enough. Robin Williams will be missed - the roles he played and the laughter and tears and joy he brought. I guess this rambling bit about how I learned to love is how I'm relating to the death of Robin Williams. I've read people saying he must not have had enough people helping him, and where was his wife, and what could have happened? But see - that darkness that we reach into to find love - for some people experiencing depression, that darkness is everywhere and permeates everything. Every reach is a reach into darkness and eventually there's no energy to reach more.
Which is why it's important to walk with people, to hold their hand while you can, and let them know they are loved. You may not be able to save them. Ultimately, it's not up to you to save other people. It's up to you to love without reservation and to understand.
If we take from the tragic death of Robin Williams the message that we should love people openly and that it's OKAY to talk about mental illness and it's OKAY to have a mental illness and that in talking with each other, there is strength and there will be more hands to hold and help you make it through that darkness for the light that really is waiting on the other side, then we are paying honor to the legacy of a man who made three generations laugh and cry and feel and cope.
And we loved him.
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