August, 2022
This summer is full of love.
I have new love, pride, weddings that were supposed to happen two years ago but didn’t, I have become a wedding planner and have my first wedding client for October 2023, I just photographed one of the most beautiful engagements ever, I have also just become ordained, ya know just you’re everyday love kind of thing
I’ve always loved love, I’m a cancer and have always identified as a hopeless romantic. I’ve been blessed enough to have been in beautiful, strong and transformative relationships my whole adult life.
But I haven’t always been good at love. In fact, due to trauma I endured as a child, and the nuerolingusitic programs I heard and saw about love in every movie and every song, I have been terrible at love. I’ve had two tragic relationship endings with two of my favorite people on the planet because I perpetuated poor beliefs, narratives, actions, and understanding about love and what it should look like. I overlaid my stories onto people that were free.
Our culture teaches us to put our lives in others. That they complete us ect. It shows us that when love doesn’t look like what we think it should, to get weird.
My biggest mistake was thinking I needed to posses something in order to have it.
In my divestment of romantic capitalism, I started to ask myself, who would I be if I never had a partner ever again? How would I love myself that much everyday?
I now eat myself as the main meal of my life, and love as the side dish. Love happens now on the edges when it’s alive. I’m in a beautiful relationship with someone I’ve crushed on for years, but we are not partners, my life is not in them, and their life is not in me.
I thought I wanted everything the systemic oppression of romance culture had to offer me. But in grieving the loss of it, I’m realizing that the universe has more to offer me than romantic capitalism ever did. I’m realizing there is more love available to me from myself and the world around me, I’m realizing that the universe is trying to give me everything I ever wanted and more. And I receive. Thank you life. Endlessly grateful, endlessly humble, and endlessly learning.