What does love mean to you?

Is it a feeling, or a place? Is it some one or some thing specific? Let’s talk about it.

For me, love is a lot of things. Love is the feeling I get when I see my parents for the first time in six months. It’s watching my niece giggle with excitement when Grammy sneakily steals a chicken nugget off of her plate. Love is laying in bed with my girlfriend telling her for the 500th time how much I adore the freckles on her lips. It’s going back to Eminence, Missouri where time never fails to slow down & the sounds of the river could put me to sleep. Love is the way I put SpongeBob stickers on my Papaw’s rear view mirror as a kid and they’re still there to this day. Except now the car is mine, and I can’t bring myself to get rid of it until the stickers disappear.

All my life I have searched for love. I looked high and low for someone to love me, so much so I felt that I was grasping at unlovable straws. something. anything. It took me a while – more than 20 years to be exact – to realize that I was too busy searching for someone to love me, I had lost sight of the idea of love itself. I am not going to pretend that there is a right way to love. All I know for sure is that the way I interpreted love was doing me a great disservice. It wasn’t until Christmas vacation of 2020 that I realized wait. I’m not doing this right.

I remember like it was yesterday – huddled up in my parents cabin. A house where fuzzy socks are always required no matter the outside temperature. My sister was pressing – “Let’s watch Little Women!” over and over again. I don’t know why she was pressing so hard, and I don’t know why I was insistent on doing literally anything else. However, there is not much to do around winter time in the Ozark Mountains. So alas, Little Women it was. I’ll give credit where it’s due, Little Women is an absolute masterpiece – all of it. But what was it that really shifted my perspective on love? This set of lines:

I’ll admit, it doesn’t hit as hard without watching Saoirse Ronan embody every bit of her character. So if you haven’t already, you should watch it for yourself.

But that was it – In that moment I realized I was Jo March. I cared only to be loved.

Over the last few years I’ve experimented with love – literally and metaphorically. I’ve let myself feel, rather than just think. I have quite literally followed my gut feeling at every turn, and no matter what I have always found my way back to myself. Which for me, has become the root of love. It’s cheesy, I know – but it really does boil down to loving yourself. I began going out with friends more often, doing things for me, indulging in the goofy things. And I stopped identifying solely as someone’s partner, or being someone that needed attention. I became myself.

I fell in love with the way my hip dips wouldn’t go away no matter how hard I tried. How my top lip practically disappears when I smile, and how playing the air guitar in the middle of the club is so much more me than shaking my ass.

Honestly, despite not being completely content with my circumstances, I began to romanticize my life. Call me naïve, but it works. It’s what led me to where I am now. Less worried about others opinions of me, or who likes me & more worried about who I allow to love me. Because honestly I’m a catch 😉

Even when life got really shitty, I never lost sight of who I was.

In fact, the moment in which I was the most ostracized in my life was when I finally took control of it. Isn’t that ironic?

To this day, my coming out reigns champion of the darkest time of my life – which is a story for another day – but still, I never once hated who I was through it. I never once questioned if I was doing the right thing for myself, and I never let the opinions & accusations of others define who I was. Despite just about everyone in my circle turning their backs on me, I stayed true to myself – that is love, and I am eternally proud of myself for it.