I Love You

Here we are, Valentine’s Day 2021. This might be a day of sweetness for you: romance or cozy love, chocolate and flowers. It might be deflating and speak of “lack” for you, leave you feeling sad or lonely. Perhaps you scoff at this commercialized Hallmark holiday, or it isn’t on your radar at all.

I love you.

We are fellow humans on this rickety rollercoaster of Life together. We have more in common than we think. Despite our differences, we all bleed, laugh, grieve, wonder, die. We all stumbled our way through 2020 and are figuring out how to live in this new (hopefully better) year.

Difficult times in life (like a global pandemic, grief and loss, or brutal temps like our current -17 degrees/-37 windchill here in Minneapolis) teach us that we need each other. We survive, from our very first moments of life, because of each other. We need each other in so many ways: our social connections, the services we provide for society, the world we have created together, and help in our darkest, most vulnerable times.

I love you.

@          @          @          @          @

This Valentine’s Day is a rough one for me. It’s the first time in 33 years I am not  with the person I loved and thought I’d spend my life with. Sigh, cue the grief, loss, tears. There’s been all that. It’s hard walking around with a heart that’s bruised and tender. I know I’m not the only one.

I love you.

I realize that VD is a holiday of privilege when we think about it in the traditional sense. It implies and encourages the celebration of romantic love. There’s nothing essentially wrong with that, but that focus excludes many, and ignores the many abundant forms of love we can access.

You might be in a relationship and feel the loss of something you need within it. You might be alone, single, wishing it were different. You might be indifferent. You might not even want a romantic relationship. You might be scornful of it all. You might be nursing a broken heart, like me.

I love you.

I think we miss the mark with this Valentine’s Day stuff by keeping it in this little bubble. Dating, coupledom, romance. There is SO much more love out there than this. There are relationships that are close, like parents & kids, siblings, good friends, a sphere of relatives…. but expand that out to neighbors, people we are in community with, those we gather with to share interests and passions… and fleeting interactions with fellow humans, or those we see in news stories or watch on You Tube videos, or by clicking “like” on a random person’s Tweet.  A world of people we will never meet.

When I let my heart grow bigger, I realize

I love you.

@          @          @          @          @

This year for the first time, with the prompting of my therapist, I made myself a Valentine card. You see it at the top of this blog post. It may seem silly, but now I wonder why I waited so long.

I have been thinking about Self-Love so much in this year of pandemic and living alone with 2 cats. Loving myself was something that eluded me for most of my life. I lacked self-esteem for many reasons, and even after a lot of therapy, I intellectually knew I was a good person, a worthy and lovable one, but on a deep level, I just couldn’t get there. A negative self-critical voice was constantly playing in the background in my head. I was often anxious, sometimes depressed, not able to feel my feelings and instead pushing them down through my eating disorder.

I love me.

Just as many things contributed to my lack of self-love, many things have propelled me forward to this place, this today, where I DO love myself. I cheer myself on, comfort myself when I’m sad, dance with myself in the kitchen when the music is good. I’m adorable, strong, kind, smart, and fallible. I still have that negative critical track in my head sometimes, but now I can often notice it and name it, untangle it and change it. It’s not perfect. I’m not perfect, which I remind myself is okay.

I love me.

This challenging Valentine’s Day, I’m transforming it into a Self-Love holiday for myself, and expanding my Love-O-Sphere to the world as well. I’m doing many sweet and nice things for myself, and some sweet and nice things for others. I’m grateful for People, in specific and general. I’m sitting here trying to stay warm with blankets and tea in my frozen city and feel the love that I have to give and receive. I’m writing a love letter to myself. I’m writing this love letter to you all.

There are many hard things. And it’s all pretty damn good anyway.

Oh, and lest you forget…

I still love you.

In case you missed it, my new book is out for pre-sale orders as of last week! (I blogged about why I wrote this book here.) You can find it on Amazon by clicking here.  If you are interested in buying it, consider ordering it now– pre-sale orders help authors out a lot. I also have an author website for my pen name with an excerpt from the book at tazmyn.ozga.com . Thanks for your support!

Photos by me, and Amy Shamblen, Jon Tyson, and Aung Soe Min, courtesy of Unsplash.com