Love Letters

Write a love letter to yourself.

I read that on a list of selfcare suggestions and it resonated. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do this. So I decided to write one, actually made a note on my “What I want to write” list, thinking to jot down some ideas, but then got stuck.

How do you start a love letter?

What exactly are you going to write?

I had only ever written one or two, and those only to my boyfriends way back in the day. In my lost-ness I seriously contemplated researching the “correct” form of a love letter; yes, I know, that is not how it works, and I have an amused but kind smile on my lips while thinking that to myself.

Saying “I love you” to anyone but your significant other has an almost taboo-like quality to it these days. There are rules around professionalism, etiquette, social standing, cultural heritage, and those are just the ones I could find on Google. I know that I have, somewhere in the process of growing up, learnt without being explicitly told, that I cannot say “I love you” to just anyone simply because I like their energy. Funnily enough, I also learnt that I cannot say “I don’t like it” when I don’t like their energy. But that is another post, I’m sure.

By the time I emerged into adulthood, Steel Caps and all, the rules were rigid. It was fine to tell someone that I loved my parents, however, it was not fine to tell them. It was ok to tell one friend that I loved another friend, but never to say it to that friend directly. It was of course allowed to say it to your partner, however, it should always be thoroughly considered, thought over deeply and not easily thrown around willy-nilly gut-felt. Hence, the very small number of love letters I ever wrote and the very wrong self assessment that I carried around for decades. I don’t feel love like others do, I don’t like people in general, I like being a hermit. If you can’t express the love, better not feel it in the first place, right?

So when I started my journey and slowly replaced the Steel Caps with Uggs – what a revelation it was that I do love people! Like, a lot of people. Like, I actually like people in general. So much so, that when meditating on my heart’s greatest desire in a class not that long ago, the word “connection” was the one that emerged.

The expression of that love, however, is still implicit, only rarely put into words. Not saying “I love you” is creating a gap between me and the world. One so much smaller than Steel Caps, true, but a gap nevertheless. A place to hide my vulnerability and my fear thereof. A space in nowhere land that also traps me, though.

So I was stuck somewhere in between wanting to write that love letter to myself and overthinking how to write it, when the universe offered help. A person very dear to me had a tremendously hard week and while crying together about it in daylight, I spontaneously told them that I loved them.

To be honest, I had a little kid moment then. You know the ones, right? Where you discover something new and liberating and amazing and you want to do it over and over and over again because you love the feeling of it? Yeah, one of those ones.

So I started to write a love letter to that friend. I wanted to tell them over and over and over again, living that little girl moment. I still had to justify my actions by logic, though and told myself that I am writing this to ensure they can read it whenever they need to.

Only hearing a beautiful share from another beloved person today finally jolted the awareness of the nowhere land I created around myself, and the fear that traps me in it. And I want it gone. I want to be brave and vulnerable and say “I love you” without consulting the index of social rules. I want to take all the love I have in my heart and give it a form, give it a place to live.

So this, here, is where I am going to start. I’ll start by writing love letters.