In 2018, around this same time, I wrote a blog post with this title.

Piper was 4, sitting around the table with me and their dad and baby brother and Auntie. Out of nowhere, Piper just looked at us and said, “What do we all want for ourselves?”

I have been remembering this ALL week. What do we really all want for ourselves?

Safety? Food? Patience? Sex? Attention? Money? Sleep? Our own home? A child? Alone time? Love?

Most of the time, in my experience, it’s love. It’s almost always love. We are willing to forgo so many things to have love with someone that we can’t imagine living without.

I am reminded of Eat, Pray, Love. In the movie she talks about working with refugees and expects the emotional trauma of severe atrocities to be what the women want to talk about. Nope. They wanted to talk about love relationships.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and working through in my own love relationship. It does seem like a love relationship is the Holy Grail of relationships, and this is why we are so obsessed with them as humans. We want someone that we can be who we really are with, but getting to the place when we’ve found the right one that loves and accepts all of our darkness along side all of our light feels like finding a needle in a haystack.

One thing I know. I know it deeply and securely. I know it like I know how my own hands look like typing. I know it I know it I know it.

That I am in LOVE with MYSELF. That being in love with another human now is completely different than any other love relationships I’ve had because I really do just LOVE MYSELF. I will never quit ME. I tell my students:

You are the only person you will live with for the rest of your life. Honor that.

-Me

So balance of loving myself exactly as I am while loving someone else for exactly as they are is where I’m putting energy right now. And I am sad to say, it has been a bit consuming. I have not been showing up for my other goals, such as my passion to write.it.all.down. I am working on how to be an authentic writer AND how to protect the intimacy and privacy of my life. I’m developing a new way of doing that. I was re-reading some of my old work recently and I can see that as a writer I am also different. I’m more concise and direct. This is exciting to me, as I feel like I’m getting closer to being able to do this-write it all down, share it, be open, and also protect my privacy. I think there is quantifiable benefit to sharing my intimate life with people IRL vs. in my writing. And also, there’s little that I think is too private to share.

I guess I think my love relationship is mine and theirs and not anyone else’s. I shared too many details with others about my marriage when I was in it, and with my last relationship when I was in it. I did this to process…but the processing needed to happen with my partner, not the world.

My love relationship is right now working on this theme, the theme of WHAT DO WE ALL WANT FOR OURSELVES? What do I want? What do they want? What do we want, together?

Oh honey, it is a lot of communication. And it is good. And it is uncomfortable and scary.

Through all of it, I’m over here loving myself because I think of myself as the best present I was ever given, and I’m here for that all day.

Namaste.