Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

the system fails us again and again and creates the illusion that we are the ones who are failing

I felt like a bruised burden, and in my refusal to become a victim, I neglected the tenderness of being a survivor

Perhaps numbness does not signify a “lack” of feeling, just as deserts do not lack for life

I have tried to return to an "untainted" version of myself, one that was oblivious to the visceral natures of pain and loss. I obsess over an imagined place of "purity", where the ghosts of my past do not roam, and I realize that as vital as it is to release my hauntings, I cannot return to a self who is untouched by pain. I do not live in a world without pain, and I cannot pretend that pain does not continue as I continue too.

I am grateful for the ways that I have protected myself in the past, for that tells me that I want to live. It tells me that, even if I do not know it, I cherish my miraculous life.

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

I am not broken, even though my heart has been.

Numbness prompted me to tend to the life in my desert and prepare myself for feeling. The rain was quickly approaching.

My shame unraveled into a cycle of self-destruction.

We must learn to discern between natural and manufactured numbness, and honor natural numbness as a call for tenderness with one another and ourselves.

Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude. Funerals are opportunities for us to express unconditional love. There is much to learn from swimming in the deep shades of our grief, and we will emerge from it basking in the sun. If we cannot honor our endings, then how are we supposed to usher in new beginnings?

Capitalism seeks to replicate numbness not to heal, but to ensure that we can continue working and consuming to avoid pain, which is deemed unproductive.

It is profound and beautiful when human beings converge, experiment, and connect in our togetherness, and people who try to police those spaces only do so because they know how powerful community can be. They are afraid, and they want us to be afraid of ourselves.

When we feel isolated, it is easier for us to be controlled. When our worlds seem small, our yearning for belonging can be manipulated.

While it is important to recognize our numbness as a crucial stage of healing, it is also important to remember that we do not have to do it alone

People who have been deeply traumatized by colonization, war, and violence have been in post-traumatic shock for generations, while capitalism expertly endeavors to pacify intergenerational pain and create more cycles of addiction. Furthermore, corporations attempt to sedate hurt people who deserve healing, and get richer from profiting off the pain that they have caused.

I felt pressured to conform to a speedy and clean recovery that required no true vulnerability, grief, or ugliness. I did not allow myself tears or solitude, and soon I began to control and dismiss myself in the very same ways that he did.

There is no emotion I would ever tell you not to feel. I do not write to encourage you to overcome any emotion. Instead, I encourage you to sit with each emotion.

On some days my fear overcomes me, and I do not believe in the power of love, but on most days, I experience embodied moments when I wholeheartedly feel love’s endurance, love’s patience, and love’s will for me to survive.

...it is possible to imagine new futures of trust.

My true desire was to relearn love and experience it from within, but because I did not know that yet, I only had the capacity to wade in the shallow waters of physical attraction.

I am devoted to relearning love without embodying shame.

I will never return to a pre-abused place, which is a hard pill to swallow. That place no longer exists and striving to get there was a disservice to the hardships I have endured.

Shame is a feeling of perpetual regret, and it holds us hostage to fruitless wishes of undoing.

Stewing in shame is a trap that halts possibilities for change, healing and accountability.

I am not my anxieties but the awareness that is experiencing them. I cannot control my anxieties, though I can be aligned with my awareness. I am as enduring as the ocean and my anxiety mimics its movements: coming, going, and washing away.

Because it can be such an overwhelming and powerful feeling, it is helpful to pay attention to what other emotions it is working with; otherwise, anger can become impulsive and dominating.

Numbness is a time of preparation for abundance.

Numbness is not a sensation merely created by man-made machines. It is a lesson found in the natural world when personhood meets pain.

We need to destigmatize the idea that we experience our hardships in isolation.