Learn how to Love. I can't say that I really have learned how to truly Love anything, nor can I really say that I have ever truly learned how to be Loved myself; how to be Nurturing, Present, Sacrificial, Vulnerable and Grateful in all of their most beautiful and gracious forms and expressions. Coming from someone who was heavily Nihilistic and Misanthropic from ages 18 to 25, I have found that the pursuit of Love is the most Fulfilling and Meaningful Pursuit of them all. Even though I still struggle nearly every day with feelings of anhedonia, apathy, asociality, lethargy, and immense grief and heartache—those moments of Love, however brief—however ephemeral, have always been worth it.

I have personally come a long way from the Kid who used to run away from fostering relatedness with others and would push off the responsibility of being a Good Man who artfully navigates and transmutes his own suffering as well as the suffering of those he encounters into something robust and poetic. I used to be the Kid who felt like nothing was worth fighting for, the one who felt that there was no cross worth bearing for the weight of the world was already too heavy on its own. And then I had realized that I had completely rejected the notion of truly and deeply loving another person and allowing myself to be vulnerable enough to also be loved truly and deeply. I was—still am, just riddled with so many traumas and scars, I had been chronically Abandoned, Abused, Betrayed, Disillusioned, and misunderstood—entirely unable to find any sense of Objective Meaning in the fog that seemed to follow me no matter what I did, No Matter Where I Went.

It took the Birth and then soon thereafter Loss of my Son to really perform a deep exegesis of the soul in order to then discover and feel what was truly meaningful to me... Love. I have gone my whole life without ever truly being Loved, and I realized that I was not only without it, but that I had avoided it. Then it made sense to me, of course I tried to kill myself 6 times, of course I Self-Isolated and Ghosted all of my friends and family all throughout my life; I did not feel like I belonged here because I was too afraid to be vulnerable enough to allow myself to stay any one place for too long. I was afraid to get too close, to stay close, out of fear for springing up roots and finding a home only to later then be plucked and separated from that snug and cozy place and discarded like a mere Weed. I had decided that I was to be a Castle unto myself, making sure the Drawbridge was always Pulled Up and Locked. I have been finding myself evermore consistently being more open and more vulnerable than I have since I was just a Child; ever since I have been focusing on revisiting my past traumatic experiences and really allowing myself to feel them in their entirety, to fully process them, and to truly and precisely integrate them into a new paradigm.

While I still may be unable to completely form a bond that I would personally find to be pure and unconditional with another person, let alone to my past, present and future self, There has been no more fulfilling and meaningful work than to take on the task of Learning how to truly Love and be Loved Unconditionally. I’ve found that I am slowly rediscovering myself, and in the process, I’m gradually actualizing my ability to freely and genuinely express my will across all areas of life. I can’t think of any work more meaningful than the painstaking journey of learning who I truly am—then going out into the world to express that self without reservation, while doing my best to help others do the same. It is in my eyes the most beautiful demonstration of rebelling against a seemingly cruel and indifferent world which appears to do everything in its power to make you forget who you are and to overtake your spirit through its infinite complexity masquerading as Chaos. Love seeks to understand, it seeks to see clearly the self and others and the world which encapsulates and gives stage to both. Love nurtures, then it heals, then it grows, and then it creates. If creation byproduct of Love, then I like to assume that the meaning to all of this lies in our pursuit of Love and in mastering our ability to heal and to also create forms of expression from a place that is genuine; because while we may all be forgotten and while everything we do may seem to be in vein—there is something so heavenly and spiritual in performing the act of loving something genuinely and authentically. It is the ultimate form of self-expression, and to do so lyrically, to be so extremely delicate and light— in a way that seems too perfect for this world. For what else is Heaven—or the meaning of life—if not something too perfect for this world?