The thing is, I am loved. I don’t know if I believe this yet, but I know it is true. I am so reluctant to tell myself that this is the case. And yet, it is.
The other thing is, you are loved too. I’m sure you’ve seen those three words too many times, plastered on Instagram infographics and on mental health fliers. It doesn’t mean much anymore. A stranger telling me that I am loved feels hypocritical— the stranger doesn’t know me. They can’t love me. They can’t know who does.
Regardless, those three words are true. You are loved. You are loved, by those who know you best. You are loved, by those who see you from afar. The latter is something I’ve learned in the last few weeks as well. We love the world and we admire others with our whole heart and we wish people knew how incredible they are, but we are not the only ones. The truth is, we are all the same at heart. We were made to live and to love. And we love, whether we intend to or not.
This is all to say that love is reciprocated. You are not the only one that marvels at others and the way their brains work and the way they look or the way they form relationships. Like this, you love others from afar. The final step is realizing that they love you too.
I think I am too insecure in my friendships. I worry too much about whether people actually want me around, or whether my messages are something they want to read, or whether they’re just here so I’m not alone. I’ve thought this way for a while. A couple days ago, I read a Twitter thread by @killdads, referencing this thought pattern exactly. In it, they write about a perspective most of us haven’t paused to consider: Isn’t it mean? Isn’t it so mean to paint our friends, our lovers with such ugly paint? Though we may not be the best friends we can be, it’s safe to say (to me, at least) that our friends are not actively malicious. They aren’t evil. They write,
“We fear they see us as disposable, but what kind of person would so cruelly dispose of us, harbor such contempt for us, what kind of names are we calling them?”
And that is the truth. We get too caught up in our insecurities to realize the implications of these thoughts on those we care about. I’ve thought about this a lot recently; I have and still struggle with the harrowing feeling of loneliness a lot, but now I am able to catch myself and tell myself that there’s no way those I love would act the way I so cruelly set them up to in my head.
This is a large act of undoing. Thoughts like these are deeply ingrained in me, they have tangled themselves with the nerves in my brain, and to extract them is a monumental task. But, I am doing it. I am going slow, and I am sure that one day it’ll be easier to deal with this feeling.
Love is everpresent, it surrounds us, it creates us, it fuels us, it IS us. There are people who love the way they feel around you in the same way that you do. You cannot get rid of love; It will remain even when we strip ourselves down to our bare bones. It will still be there.
My primary inspiration for today's newsletter has been my friends. To them, those close and those far: I am sorry I may not have felt your love. I am sorry if you have not felt mine. But love has always been here, and I hope we can hold her in our hands together now.
I was going to post this later, but I realized today was National Poetry Day, and it felt only right to hand you this now. Here is one about platonic love for a rainy day, called In the Company of Women by January Gill O'Neil:
Make me laugh over coffee,
make it a double, make it frothy
so it seethes in our delight.
Make my cup overflow
with your small happiness.
I want to hoot and snort and cackle and chuckle.
Let your laughter fill me like a bell.
Let me listen to your ringing and singing
as Billie Holiday croons above our heads.
Sorry, the blues are nowhere to be found.
Not tonight. Not here.
No makeup. No tears.
Only contours. Only curves.
Each sip takes back a pound,
each dry-roasted swirl takes our soul.
Can I have a refill, just one more?
Let the bitterness sink to the bottom of our lives.
Let us take this joy to go.
To close, here are some Good Things! This newsletter (<3), this song (<3), this poem (<3), and this fat bear (<3).
Thank you for reading, as always.
Love,
Aarushi.
Loving is Limitless
:,)
i love this so much