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.

You know, when I start telling you something by saying, ‘I was thinking about what you said about …,’ it always gives me pleasure to say that, to let you know that I was brooding on your words. And I think the pleasure is … well, I know how much I love it when you say ‘I was thinking about what you said about …’ It’s somehow as though the part of you that’s in me will be able to nourish the part of me that’s in you, or-something-I don’t know how to put it. But that there’s some circuit of reciprocity between these holding relations: your ability to hold me inside you, and mine to hold you inside me.

∆ Eve Sedgwick, A Dialogue on Love