february

I used to hate Valentines Day.

Not actively, I wasn’t going around grinch-ing on everyone in relationships or tearing candy heart decor off of shelves and from storefront window displays. It was more of a quiet hatred.

A hatred that felt justified but also unjustified, one that dragged on, one that made me feel hot and cold and self-pitying and also ashamed to be feeling so triggered.

I think most holidays are commercialized in America nowadays. Our ‘mainstream’ holidays are by definition integrated into popular culture, I find it hard to separate what we are celebrating from the consumerism and expectations the idea of the day inherently contains.

Yet I’m a sucker for a good love story. A really good romance caught between the pages of a novel or played out on the screen has the power to captivate me, send me spiraling, enable me to rethink my entire life in its aftermath.

I’ve also been on a quest to ‘find of self love’— a cop out phrase, an admittedly cheesy sentiment, an occasionally aimless pursuit… for years.

Though I’d been going about it with a blindfold on, searching for some illusive object I’d ‘know once I found it’, in a dark and infinite room.

It wasn’t as much of a needle in a haystack as it is searching for something that is not to be found.

The concept of ‘self-love’ is equally as commercialized as our holidays have become. Everyone has their own impressions and definitions of what it means.

There are those like me, actively searching for something to check another box: ‘loving myself’,

There are full blown skeptics who might reject the idea or pursuit entirely, not feeling a void or searching for anything to fill it,

There are those who claim to have ‘found it’ and profess an honorable check-list of practical tangible steps to get there,

But I’d argue the people who do feel real love for towards themselves aren’t preaching about finding it, because it isn’t something to be found.

Stick with me as I dive headfirst into a metaphor.

Let’s say we’ve each designed a garden and in that garden there are countless different types of seeds we can plant— these seeds are going to represent our relationships and connections of all shapes and sizes, and we plant them in different seasons.

Some require more care and attention than others, some thrive for years and die off unexpectedly with a heart wrenching withering.

Some grow very tall and some are small but we bear the fruits of them just the same.

Some seeds we plant and their roots grow so deep and so strong that they prosper in our garden long after we’ve gone.

We don’t judge their shape and size, we take them for what they are and for the purpose they serve throughout their (and our) life cycle.

If the garden is our reality… self love is the soil that fosters all of this beautiful, serendipitous, connection and growth throughout our lives. Self-love is the foundation.

The nutrients and water and care we put into this soil is what lays the foundation for the seeds we plant to grow and thrive. The plants that grow give back to the soil, in their prosperity they help the soil get healthier and more vibrant too.

And even when the ground freezes and the months turn cold the soil remains, its care may look different and the plants that grow in these seasons may look fewer and farther between but they are resilient. And this is all part of the lifecycle, the ebbs and flows and abundance and scarcity. It all cycles through and we’re the foundation of it all, the fundamental love within us.

So why is it that we embark on this quest to ‘find’ the very soil that is the foundation of everything going on around us? For starters, the majority of us aren’t taught how to garden. We don’t know how to tend to the soil with care and concern, we feel ashamed and confused when the quality of our soil isn’t producing the healthy thriving greenery we hope to see blooming in our day to day lives.

And we compare our garden endlessly to the garden next door, their plants look taller and stronger and greener and why don’t ours look the same?

We might not have the same seeds, or gardening tools, or even know the half of how much time and care our neighbor has put into getting their garden to this picture of success… yet we size ourselves up accordingly making us feel inferior.

We focus on what we can do to effect the outside results without looking at the foundation, here we have the most leverage and autonomy to create real change. It begins with you and the outside world is a mere reflection.

We make holidays like Valentines Day revolve around romantic love, on the surface they are marketed to us this way. But a celebration of love is about all love, all the different and diverse plants growing in our gardens throughout our lives. You wouldn’t want a garden of all the same type of seed growing because they’d all be competing for resources you also need to allocate to yourself.

There is romantic love and it grows and dies and so does everything else, it is a life cycle, we don’t judge the changing seasons as wrong or as a reflection of our gardening skills or inherent worthiness. It just is.

I don’t know that I’ve ever kept a plant alive. Does that make me a shitty gardener? Maybe. But in my metaphorical garden of life I’ve certainly seen plants thrive and wither, I’ve planted seeds that have grown bigger and stronger than I’d ever imagined, I’ve experienced the unexpected and heartbreaking die off of a failed harvest when I was expecting seasons of prosperity. None of that is a reflection of me as a human, of my capacity and willingness to love.

The seasons will keep changing and the plants in my garden will continue to cycle with them, some sticking around season after season and some sprouting just to teach me a lesson or two.

What I am learning is that the care and attention I put into the soil is a direct reflection of the quality of life of the seeds I’ve planted, for whatever duration they’re around. I might not control the life cycle but I control the resources I allocate to nurturing the foundation of all the growth and beauty and living and dying.

There are abundant shapes and sizes and flavors and colors of love to be discovered in ever corner of our lives. Love is inherent to us, it is our birth right, it is not something that can be taken away when a person walks out of our lives. When things change.

It’s funny that while we know life is temporary we expect so many things to never change. I didn’t expect to go on hating Valentine’s Day forever, but I went on believing that something had to change externally for me to like it again, to feel the love from the outside in, never of my own accord.

And though much has changed externally in my life it was the internal shifts that made me open back up to loving a day dedicated to love. It doesn’t have to be about romantic love, it doesn’t have to be about the past or the future, it doesn’t have to be about anything if you don’t choose to subscribe to it.

But you get to choose the meaning. You get to make the shift inside of you that will reflect back in the corners of your life you didn’t realize needed dusting off and cleaning up. You get to cultivate the soil and take ownership for your foundation.

So Instead of declaring to love yourself again like the flip of a light switch, can you set an intention to be more loving, towards whoever and whatever you engage with today? Yourself included?

You have the power to infuse more love into your own life, there is no need to seek it or achieve it or find it somewhere outside yourself. It begins with you.