LOVE

There’s something I noticed about human nature as it pertains to our darkest moments —we prefer not to talk about it. We take the same approach with love sometimes too. We want a love that fulfills our unspoken needs; love that doesn’t require us to unpack our traumas for ourselves; and sometimes, when we have unpacked them, we don’t want to have to do the due diligence of translating our understanding of ourselves to the new person in our lives —especially if we already went through that with someone else.

We also do that thing where our brain fills in the gaps for us so we move as if conversations have happened that never happened with the current person. On top of all that, the way we share on social media makes us feel like more things are understood about us than are actually understood about us.

Somehow, with all of our unwillingness and reluctance to communicate our foundational quirks and needs, we turn to love to pick us up out of our perpetual lows. What we do when we turn to a half-kept love to fill holes in our lives is fill our fully broken parts with half-fulfilling intimacies. I can’t think of an analogy that I have a full understanding of to bring to life so suffice it to say, this practice is like mixing two liquids that will eventually solidify but without measuring the precise amount that will keep that solid from cracking and breaking. It doesn’t mean the liquids don’t work together— it just means we can’t know if it works if we don’t work it out right before mixing them together.

If anyone knows what it’s like to escape into the folds of someone’s untested expression of love to hide from the darkness of mental unbalance and life’s woes, it’s me. If anyone knows that not only is that escape temporary but it also inevitably adds to the issues that existed before the tryst, it’s also me. If anyone knows what it’s like to know that and still jump face-first into the escape— yes, me again.

But, if anyone knows that there comes a time when you’re so tired of repeating your mistakes that you begin to implement what you learn and results begin to surface, little by little, it’s also me. If anyone has felt the pain that comes with the improvements because they know that there’s no way this self-sabotaging entity can sustain the change that they searched for —it’s me.

What I learned in the back and forth of using someone’s attempts at love (whether sincere or just as broken as my own) as a scouring pad to scrape away the debris of said brokenness is that nothing in this life was meant to be achieved by ourselves, let alone sustained by our insufficient selves.

I recently heard one of the simplest and most eloquent breakdowns of our reliance on God that has ever been uttered and it was beautiful. The person mentioned how water exists, how fish exists in water but how they cannot survive without water. Water is a fish’s source. They went on to explain how the earth (dirt and the nutrients in it) exists on its own but how trees cannot exist without the earth. The earth is a tree’s source. They used the same formula to describe how God exists and needs nothing else to exist but that we were created in the image and likeness of God. God can exist without us but we cannot exist without God. God is our source. The thing that people question is how the latter could be true if there are atheists that are alive today. People who don’t believe in God exist all over the world.

The thing I’ve come to learn is that whether or not we believe in God, we exist by God’s grace. What takes our existence from a mere statement of fact to something that we can enjoy —what moves us from merely existing to living is a connection to our source. A relationship with God is what makes the difference between a life and a purposeful and abundant life. This also explains why there are people who believe in God and still don’t live purposeful and abundant lives —knowing God and having a relationship with God are different things entirely.

This brings us back to the way we use love as an escape from our trouble. We can know the person we find ourselves in relationship with in the most basic sense —we can know their names, what they do for work, their birthdays, and what happened at the park when they were 7 years old but without getting to know their heart, without letting them get to know our hearts, is it a real relationship or a meantime connection, like stepping under an awning to get out of the rain?

Real love can be a reprieve from the rain but it will be so much more than that. This isn’t meant to be discouraging in the direction of looking for love. This isn’t even a declaration of where you need to be before love can be real. This is an invitation to learn about love from the creator of love so that when you find it, you’ll know how to add to it, you’ll know how it should add to you, and so it isn’t something else to cry on your therapist’s couch about (well, you can but hopefully from tears of joy next time.").

PRAYER

God, I don’t really talk about this because it’s too vulnerable but keeping all these disappointments I’ve experienced in love, to myself, it’s adding to the mental pressure I feel and at this point, it’s more about scratching an itch than any real desire for connection or longevity. Part of me doesn’t want to even admit that it exists or that it’s still even a little hopeful. I’m tempted to want it to die so that I never have to feel the displeasure of misconnection again. Help me to not give into that darkness, that hopelessness that taints the way I look at love. Help me to not give in to the hopelessness that taints the way I look at myself. I want to believe that you have a better way but I’m dreading what the process of getting there will feel like. Help me to do it anyway. Keep me reminded so that I don’t change my mind when it gets difficult. Keep the mental pressure from tainting my hope for love. Keep my past traumas from giving life to habits that create new ones. Protect my future from my present self. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

JOURNAL CHALLENGE

What role has love or physical intimacy played in your mental health journey? How has your view of love changed based on the results you’ve gained from the way you’ve approached it? What are some things you can do differently going forward?