I recently read a book called Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn that has left me with a new persepctive on the love interwoven into my life.
Specifically, I’ve been acutely aware of the unexpected ways love presents itself in my life beyond the romantic, platonic, and familial connections that so readily come to mind. This is a reflection on how writing has been a steady form of love in my life in several facets.
I guess you could say that I’m writing a love letter to loving to write.
“I love to write” is a sentence I’ve said many times before.
“I write to love” is a sentence I’ve never said before. But it’s one I’ll say again going forward.
Writing is an inconspicuous form of love — how I connect with myself, my loved ones, and strangers through writing.
Writing as a form of self-love.
I feel love whenever I write.
Sometimes I’m journaling to get all my stream-of-consciousness thoughts out on paper as quickly as possible. I share the stories of my life that stuck out — the things I can’t get over, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I check in on myself: how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking, how much I’m craving a sandwich. Sometimes it’s light-hearted and I joke with myself in the pages of a unsuspecting journal that’ll never see the light of day but I think would be epic in a memoir if I were to ever publish one. Other days, the words coming out of my pen paint a deep dark series of thoughts that feel so sweetly simultaneously shameful and satisfying to put on paper. Then, I can’t imagine having ever made a joke in the pages preceeding where I can still kind of make out the ink that’s bled through. These are the pages I think about setting on fire after the fact. Regardless of what I’m scribbling down in my journaling session, I love that I can to know myself more this way.
Other times when I write, I’m thinking so very carefully about every word I put down. I search the back drawers of my mind for the perfect words to articulate what I truly mean. Maybe I’m writing a thesis for a class. Am I explaining this right? Or a manuscript for a book I hope to one day publish. How do I say what I think without being one day cancelled? Or documentation for a product I built at work. How can I write this clearly so that no one has to message me about it? In those moments, I’m digging deeper and working on developing a craft that is important to me. I find this work to constitute another important form of self-love.
A lot of my writing falls between the spectrum from casual journaling to academic writing that people will take seriously. All of it though, I believe, helps me to connect with and better myself.
It’s easy to neglect the ways in which we love ourselves. The effort, time, and love that it takes to show up for yourself is far more significant than I notice. I’ve realized now that has become writing one of my favorite ways to show up for myself.
Writing as a form of love for loved ones.
Writing as a form of love for others is more noticable than what we consider as self-love. We write to express ourselves and communicate with others. To connect with others.
I don’t get to see everyone I care about as often as I would like to. I have friends and family across the world. Others live close by but are busy with their own hectic and wonderful lives. These days, I end up writing a lot to share the stories of my life with my loved ones.
I’ve felt loved by writing too.
The important people in my life are also individually each writing their own stories in this world. They’re becoming wonderfully complex characters who are making names for themselves in all the different epic parts of society that they meander in. They share their stories with me through writing too, and it’s become a huge sense of connection for us.
There are many other forms of writing that make me feel loved by my friends and family.
I feel it in writing as short as a text.
Text me when you’re home safe.
How are you? It’s been a while and I was just thinking about you.
Or as long and raw as writing in a pages-long love letter that ends with every proclamation of appreciation you could think of before a final I love you.
Writing out our stories and sharing our voices with each other is a form of love that can often transcend distance and other signifcicant barriers to love in our modern world. I love that about writing.
Writing as a form of love for strangers.
Lastly, we can connect with people we have never met and will never meet in person when we write.
When I publish my writing, I’m trying to capture the human experience in a pretty way that I can only hope can resonate with someone else. Sometimes, I can connect with strangers this way, and I think that’s pretty epic.
This also goes the other way around. I have felt love in the moments when I read something that resonated with me. When it feels like someone else has captured the exact feelings you are feeling but hadn’t ever vocalized before.
Or when you learn something important and relevant because someone has put together an educational guide out into the world because they envisioned an abstract version of you wanting to learn it in the future.
Or when an author is sharing their most vulnerable experiences and feelings.
Even though strangers’ words, I feel the love in reading their writing.
I think that the essence of humanity can be written down and shared by anybody, not just writers. I think back to when I encountered the strangers project exhibit a few months back, and the extreme vulnerability of everyone’s stories and writing. In that room, I felt the love and human connection. Anyone can write and everyone has a story to tell. That’s a beautiful and powerful combination.
Writing is a universal love language.
To everyone who doesn’t think of themselves as a writer: yes you are. Every word you spew into this word carries a part of you.
Not to be cheesy and quote one of the cheesiest rom coms out there, but I’ve come to realize that “love actually is all around.” But in my humble opinion, it’s not even just all around you. It’s also within you, spewing out of you, and flowing all around like speedy beautiful little particles in motion.
So let’s allow ourselves to let it out and take it in.
