you are love

and the quiet resistance of coming home to yourself

I used to be bitter, jaded by the realities of a life I didn’t ask to be brought into. Always a little too aware for my age and my circumstances, I felt at times like I was born with that ever-elusive third eye that the wanna-be gurus are always talking about. And with it, I indeed saw the wisdom of the world, but too soon and too abundantly I saw how injustice and torment poured out from the broken-hearted.

How loss and grief roiled behind the eyes of the pragmatists.

How distrust and insecurity spilled from the mouths of the haters.

How a need to hurt people echoed in the hearts of hurt people.

And because I was young and impressionable and hungry to earn love from the endless circle of tortured souls amongst whom I depended on, I adapted.

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One angsty teenage day, in the car with my dad, context long forgotten, he told me that all actions are doomed to consequence, and the smartest thing I could do was to not succumb to decisions made on emotion.

Echoes of regret etched deep within emphasized every syllable.

Already, a longing to earn his approval had hardened my youth. A precious cocktail this, when combined with mother’s own grief and regret, for which I was the final hope, the last stand. Mix in a healthy measure of narcissistic emotional abuse from the step-parent I was regularly pawned off to, and you’ve got a recipe for emotionless perfectionism and fundamental fear of ever being wrong or making a mistake.

I learned that in order to save us all, I must live a life devoid of regret.

Choice after crippling choice, I dedicated my adulthood to being unregrettable. A calculated dance of performative risk (so as to maintain my illusory claim to free-spiritedness) and constant achievement (so as to live up to my long-acclaimed Gifted Child Syndrome). Each a pruned and honed mask for which to hide my true self behind. For she had never gotten us anywhere worth being or worth loving.

I resented the burden of her, so I stifled the sound of her beating heart. She had no place in a scarred, scared world.

I lived by a code of survival, of adaptation. I bear the scars of living like a badge of honor, of belonging.

See, I, too, am broken enough to belong here with you.

Broken enough for my dad to understand me.

Broken enough for my mom to care for me.

Broken enough for my friends to find me interesting.

Broken enough for the world to owe me instead of me tolerating the weight of acknowledging all that I, in fact, owed it.

This is a place where so unbelievably many people stop. Like they’ve seen enough and found acceptance in their belief that there really is no point in going further.

This is a place they understand. A point of good enough. And the excuses of adulthood kill their resolve and bolster their right to develop no further.

This place is a quicksand. It will eat you alive. But like an ever-heating bath, degree after degree ticking by as you become all too accustomed and attached to the heat, you don’t realize when you start to die.

It’s slow, and life unfolds as it will around you. Babies are born, promotions are granted, losses are incurred, and suddenly the quicksand in which you’re rooted feels like a blessing. For it keeps you grounded in the face of this unpredictable life, swirling around you.

What an odd thing it is that, though we have experience and genetics to attribute to our getting stuck in the first place, we have only ourselves to blame for the staying.

On my very first day on Substack, the algorithm graced my feed with an article entitled "You Are What You Love" and in a true serendipitous moment of right place, right time. Sherry Ning changed my life.

“I walked into an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that was happening across the street from my house, where I first heard of the motto: Your best thinking got you here. If our thoughts steer our destiny, why is there still so much suffering among people who know better?

The tension between these two sayings is the most important question you can ask about what it means to become someone better: the first puts you in the driver’s seat; the second suggests the car has been going somewhere you didn’t choose. The Nietzschean wrinkle in the promise of agency is that you are as responsible for your own destruction as you are for your glimmering success, so, what happens when we come to the end of ourselves? If thinking is the epicenter of our lives, why can’t we simply think ourselves out of addictions, pits of depression, or panic attacks? Why do people leave their families? Why can’t we shed our worries? Why do people commit suicide?

Why does education not reduce sadness? Why does memorizing the teachings of prophets not make a person feel comforted in times of crisis or closer to God at all? Addictions are called addictions precisely because they make you feel like you no longer have agency. Your best thinking got you here means: the tool you’re trying to use to escape your disease—your conscious, watchful, rational mind—has been running the whole time, and it hasn’t changed anything.”

— Sherry Ning, You Are What You Love

It was perhaps the first putting-to-words of what it was I had seen my whole life, for which I had concluded myself to be the problem for noticing.

The very understanding I had hid so completely, thinking it was the reason I was not worthy of unconditional love. That I could not fit in with my peers. That I did not want what everyone told me I should want. That I didn’t innately chase validation from men or care about the opinions of others. That I didn’t dream of a house teeming with children and a husband to polish like he was my crowning achievement.

Or why a career didn’t interest me as much as my perpetual yearning to understand. How I always found myself the holder of wisdom that fell on deaf or ignorant ears, or that I was shamed in my attempt to share.

I learned to subdo. To cloak the honest mirror of my thoughts behind a more colloquial and acceptable mask of the polite girl doing as she’s told.

Even yesterday, a friend texted me that our other mutual friend and I seemed to share a lingo she just couldn’t fake, and my solemn response was, “I’ve long learned how to blend in when I have to.”

There are people, like this friend and my husband and others, who have all told me on first impression they found me intriguing, and I’d like to think it’s because they saw through the mask and didn’t fear the mirror beneath. But I did. Because I was not groomed to love this mirror, but to turn away from it in quiet shame.

When we stop wanting, we are diseased (literally, dis-eased, not at ease). We know this physically: when we have the flu we don’t feel like eating, and we know we’re recovering when our appetite returns. The same is true at every other level. It’s what Ezekiel meant by, “I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.” A hardened heart is not just stubbornness, it’s spiritual sickness.

— Sherry Ning, You Are What You Love

Stuck, diseased, heart turning to stone, I forgot what I loved and what it was to be loved. Or maybe, I never knew.

I saw the path go fuzzy before me, and I felt the sweet caress of heavy sand collecting around my ankles. Meaning became elusive; maybe this is it. I wondered why, at all, I had a right to think there was any more for me out there than anyone else.

Internally, I rejected all that made me like, but behaviorally, I walked the same walk as everyone else. And it’s our actions, and our response to their consequences, that make us.

But I am not like. I never have been. And calling upon that natal third eye, I willed it to look boldly into the very mirror I hid behind and from. And there, though fuzzy and indistinct, was another choice.

A choice with consequences. One that would quite possibly lead to regret. One that I had no confidence in myself to navigate without mistakes. One that, should I choose it, would demand a total and utter relinquishing of the carefully constructed ego that had cloaked me since the day I learned I was unlovable.

With fear eclipsing all reason and under heavy protestation from my survivalist nervous system, I chose to step from the sand.

It fell away at my feet,

for it was never really there at all.

When we want to change, the metamorphosis we look for is not intellectual (you can’t just “know” what’s good for you and suddenly get better). The addict doesn’t need more information about why their habit is destroying them. What they need is a different want, by practice and intention—by submitting to different desires. You don’t recover from an addiction when you’re deprived of that thing, you recover when you don’t want it anymore, even when it’s placed right in front of you. A true change in being is a change in appetite. True conversion is a change in heart.

— Sherry Ning, You Are What You Love

spotted on a recent trip in Seattle

Love is a leap of faith.

Love is a surrender.

Love is an awakening.

You know it when you feel it. Sometimes it comes on slowly. Sometimes it’s masked behind passion and lust. Sometimes it’s sticky like sap that clings to the skin. Sometimes it’s an electric current pulsing through your veins. Sometimes it’s a quiet knowing, an assuredness, a sense of safety.

But when it’s real. You know it, and you do not need to question it.

And for all the discussion here on choices, as I’ve slowly adapted to live in, of, and as love, I wonder if love is really a choice at all. Or maybe it’s just something we are.

Maybe you are what you love because you are love.

Actions not made from a place of genuine and unbridled love are what ruin us all. Because they are not of us, so how could we be of them?

Cognitive dissonance is the psychological discomfort you feel when your actions, beliefs, or values contradict each other.

Because people naturally crave mental harmony, this tension drives us to subconsciously justify our behaviors or alter our beliefs to resolve the uncomfortable feeling.

The quicksand is an excuse, a justification offered by the subconscious to ease the discomfort of knowing that you are not living in harmony with your true nature. That you are not orienting to and operating from a place of love.

Living a heart-led life is saying, how you do one thing is how you do everything. The path upward is not more consciousness or more rigorous self-monitoring, but the embodied work of reordering your loves: finding something worth loving completely, and letting that love do what only love can: shape you, from the inside out, into someone new.

— Sherry Ning, You Are What You Love

It is a sacrifice of certainty. But certainty was only ever an illusion to begin with.

The stuck place is a gateway. By no means is it the final test, but it is a choice. One that you always possess, that asks you how you want to experience life beyond the now.

Your answer can be as radical as your wildest dreams or as tame as your comfort zone.

But before you choose, look first within at all that you love. For there you will see not pain or torment or fear or injustice, but the truth of who you are and what you’re capable of.

Therein you will find your power.

“Our task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

—Rumi

anyway, here it is…

-June

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