"Please, just let love in. Tell people how you feel, and do not worry about being too much. Be too much. Care too much. Let people show up for you. Let people remind you that there is goodness in this world. Be vulnerable, do not be afraid of what you feel. Try to find the beauty in each breakdown, try to move forward and let go; try to learn and believe in new beginnings despite what you have been through. Kiss the faces of your friends, hug their broken pieces back together, laugh loudly and hope loudly and live loudly and be gentle with yourself, be gentle with your healing. Connect, connect, connect - with every ounce of who you are, with every inch of your patchwork heart. Connect with the people who make you feel deeply. Connect with the moments that bring tears to your eyes. Connect with the things that make your hands shake, embrace the things that make you aware of just how lucky you are to be alive. Please, just connect - because beautiful things are vanishing each and every day. Do not let your heart become one of them." - Bianca Sparacino

Here’s the principle I live by: love the people who choose you. That’s how you prove to yourself that you care about being chosen. I write all the time on this Substack that the point of life is love. And love is not a theoretical thing, it’s something that we live out. If someone says they love me and then they vanish, I don’t think they’re a bad person, but I know they don’t love me because they’re not acting like they love me, lol. Choose someone who values you and shows it.

We can live without anyone, Bear. Humans are very resilient. We lose parents and children and spouses and we keep on breathing. When someone says “I need you to live,” that’s not flattering, that’s fiction. I think what makes love special is the very act of choice: I don’t love you because I need you, I love you because I see something in you that makes everything seem brighter. I prove my love by choosing you every day, over and over again. My love is in my repetition and my love is in my faith. You don’t need to manipulate or coax someone into loving you. Games like that aren’t worth playing—people play those games when they don’t believe that there’s a light in them that someone else will see. There is a light in you, Bear, and you’ll thrive when you tend to it carefully.

Remember: we trap ourselves in the present when we refuse to let go of it. So let go. The future will find you.

In our society we make much of love and say little about fear. Yet we are all terribly afraid most of the time. As a culture we are obsessed with the notion of safety. Yet we do not question why we live in states of extreme anxiety and dread. Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference of any kind will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.