All about Love

I’ve always been a little cynical about love.

I’m not entirely sure where it came from, but it’s always been there, lingering under the surface. It usually emerges annually, right around Valentine’s Day.

I didn’t realize this was common until I read All about love by Bell Hooks.

The book got me in the first few pages with: “Youth culture today is cynical about love. And that cynicism has come from their pervasive feeling love cannot be found”.

That one line hooked me, and I didn’t look back until I’d poured through a dissection of love, in all its different manifestations. And it made me think about love in a new way and I’ve been trying to reflect on it for months now. I’ve been trying to write about it, to go back through all the pages I dog-eared to remember the feelings and thoughts I had when I read it. But recapturing that was and still is hard. I'm still not sure I'll be able to do it justice, but I'm going to try.

Love has always made sense to me in the familial and friend context and I realize how blessed I am to be able to write that sentence. Where it’s lost and confused me are in the romantic and self contexts.

I won’t write multiple nonsensical paragraphs about romantic love because I can’t describe something I haven’t experienced and still don’t fully understand. And more honestly because Bell Hooks did it so well in the book and nothing, I could write could even come close to that.

But self-love, that’s something I can speak to, something I can scratch the surface of.

I’ve been on a self-love journey for a while now and it ebbs and flows. But for me it comes from understanding myself and that I’m not fixed in who I am. It involves rediscovering this person, this body I live in and carries me, this brain that produces my thoughts on a regular basis. In recognizing the person I was 5 years ago is not the person I am today, and I need to get to know her, discover her, and find a way to love her. And that as that happens initially it's confusing, it's hard to learn to love this new iteration of yourself who's a bit different and strange. But eventually, it will happen.

It's finding joy and happiness in change and rediscovery. It's being inquisitive about these and taking the fear that accompanies that in stride, rather than running away from it.

And that's all I can put into words about this book for now. I don't have more words about love, yet. Maybe one day I will.