When a Writer Falls in Love

When a writer falls in love, their work blooms into a form of art that expresses the deep emotion they feel for their lover. The word “difficult” doesn’t reach the intensity of trouble that comes with any attempt of writing. It is in every way challenging, a complexity you cannot understand enough to overcome. It becomes onerous. Because somehow, every idea, every thought, and every word that escapes my mind, written by pen onto paper becomes something influenced by you. This influence, this love, it becomes impenetrable.

My focus could be the beauty of the sun. The bright, radiant light it provides that gleams over us all. I could inform my readers about how much I appreciate the sun due to my fear of the night. How the sun is the star located at the center of the solar system, and how without the sun there would be no earth. Yet quickly, the sun would become a synonym for you. For the comfort you provide me with, for the way there would be no me without you. The sun would become you within a few sentences. I would get lost in my writing, convinced that I am writing about the sun when in all reality I am writing about you.

I am able to begin a memoir on the life of a sad young girl. It would focus on her running away, the way she survived a rape, or how she overcame depression. There would be so many different life lessons and memories I have the chance to touch upon. However, I know somehow I’d find myself fast-forwarding to the moment she meets you.

I could take on an assignment in which would involve writing a review on a book, a play, or even a movie. An assignment that would involve my opinion and nothing else yet somehow, I’d discover another approach to mention how I had discussed it with you.

Incipiently, I created this belief that you had clouded my thoughts. Becoming a voluminous mental block for anything other than you. Though, I realize now that you have become nothing other than my biggest motivation. On one occasion I read, “If you make a writer fall in love, you will never die”, and never before did I make sense of this quote meant until I met you. In any lifetime and in any story, you have become my biggest inspiration. On the days I love you unconditionally, through the good and the bad. You have become my main character. My muse. My creative influence.

A writer in love can be oblivious to this unconscious need to convey their intoxicating love for another. A writer in love could be dangerous. But what danger exists without some form of beauty? 

When I say "I love you"

When I say ‘I love you’, it means that I treasure your heart. It means that I value you. And it means that I see a future with you.

When I say ‘I love you’, it means that I trust you with my whole soul. It means that you being happy, makes me happy. And it means that I would never ever want to do anything to hurt you.

So, when I say, ‘I love you’, please do not take it lightly.

For me, the word ‘love’ holds weight. It means something to me. It means something more than ‘I like you’ or, ‘I have a crush on you’. To me, ‘I love you’, means that I see my universe pointed in your direction. It means that I recognize how lucky I am to have you. And when I say it to you, please remember that when I say ‘I love you’, it means that I always will.

I don’t love lightly. I don’t love gently or softly. I love hard. Some may say I even love too much. But I would rather love hard any day than to take that sentence lightly. I would rather love too much, than to never love at all.

When I say, ‘I love you’ it means that no matter what, waking up to you would be my idea of the perfect morning. It means that no matter what, sleeping next to you would be my idea of a perfect night. It means that I want to keep waking up to you, each and every morning and each and every transition from fall to summer. When I say, ‘I love you’ it means that I can picture what a future looks like with you. And it means that I want one.

So, please, do not take those three words with a grain of salt. Don’t shrug at me, or smile a sly little smile. Acknowledge my love. Feel it. Accept it. And if you feel the same, than take my heart with yours.

When I say, ‘I love you’, I mean it. I’m not saying it just to make you happy. I’m not saying it to be romantic. I’m not saying it because I feel like I have to, or because I feel like there’s a deadline I have to reach.

‘I love you’ means that I want to spend hours talking with you at midnight. It means that I want to grow old with you and still call you perfect even when your wrinkles start to show. It means that even if we end, my love won’t dim. My love for you will never end.

So when I say that to you, please believe me. And when you are ready to say it back to me, only say it when you truly mean it. Only say it when you believe in me too. 

You are strong. You are brave.

Anxiety and depression. It is culminated in the constant thinking, worrying about everything, and letting it affect your life. The frustration, the self-loathing and the endless hours of time drowning in your own all-consuming thoughts.

I know it all because I’ve been there. Through every panic attack and mental breakdown alone in my room or in a room full of strangers, I’ve experienced it all. I can relate.

It’s easy to feel like you’re alone in it all. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re not good enough for others because of your need to overanalyze every little thing, where the thoughts race through your head at a mile a minute every day. That’s the problem with anxiety and depression; it makes it so easy for you to believe the

Anxiety and depression can be crippling. It grasps your mind and body and doesn’t let go, no matter how many times you convince yourself it doesn’t exist in your body. It can make you feel weak and useless. But, you know what? It actually makes you the strongest person in the world.

Imagine waking up every morning to face the same issue day in and day out. You are doing just that, facing your own inner demons every single day. And it makes you stronger. Your anxiety and depression is making you stronger, no matter how much it feels like it is eating away at your insides and taking over your life.

Not only are you strong, but you are brave. You are brave for not simply giving in. You are brave for living your everyday life even though your mind is telling you that it is not worth the pain. And anxiety and depression can be painful to the point where you feel the need to hole up in your room and let the tears spill out. Crying out the frustration becomes more appealing when your mind is constantly running at the speed of light, telling you you’re not worthy of the good things in life.

The demons you have to face are ones that live inside of you, and how brave are you to deal with them every minute of every day?
Even worse, it becomes so simple to look at others and compare yourself to them. Magnified by anxiety and depression, comparing myself to the world around me is something I find myself doing every day. I want to stop, but sometimes my mind won’t let me.

There are times when I look in the mirror and hate what I see. My mind is constantly telling me to be skinnier, prettier and just better. And guess what? You’ll believe it because who do you trust more than yourself? It is a never-ending cycle of thoughts that can keep you awake all night long. But it’s not just you.

Sometimes you feel embarrassed or ashamed, but anxiety and depression is something so common. Millions of people go through the same thing each and every day and they understand. The last thing you are in this world is alone in your fight against yourself.

It is time for us to stop feeling embarrassed for being in our own heads. There historically has been a stigma associated with anxiety and depression, but the more people talk about it, the more that stigma will end up becoming the norm.

Overcoming this won’t be easy or an overnight fix. But that is okay. And you need to remember that.

Each day that you get up and go on with life is a day that you’ve won the battle. Each day you take on the world is a little victory.

So, do one thing that scares you each day. Be brave. Because as those small victories become the norm, you’ll begin to realize that anxiety and depression may be a part of your life, but they certainly don’t define it. 

A Love More Than Words

You’re the only person I know who makes me hate words. This is no sweet nothing. I mean, how could you? Words are my thing. They’re all I’ve got. It’s a fact and a frustration that whenever you pop into my mind I get a little bit swept away, and whenever I hear your voice from across a room every precious word I have ever learned is wiped from my memory. They all give up, dead on arrival, power rendered useless.

From the moment we lock eyes to the very last kiss I feel mute. All of a sudden, this person who has dedicated their life to conveying emotion through words is at a loss for them, right when I needed them the most.

If I could, I’d climb atop every coffee shop table and shout your name; I’d grab your hand in a room crowded with our whispering friends and let you unravel my dreams, imparting every memory until you crouch with the weight of them. If I could, I’d piece together poetry and music, and I’d preach it as loud as any god would let me.

But I can’t. Not now.

So, what do I do? I learn to talk with my hands and my eyes; I learn to shout with them: with each glance or inside joke; with my fingers in your hair and the slow warmth of our bodies; with pink ears and a fluttering pulse. I have too many feelings for me to waste with words, so, most of the time, I am silent. In those moments, my words die within me. They are mute, powerless. And yet, I am screaming. I am strong, because in that blissful span of time, in one person’s company, I am happier than I have ever been alone with a million words.

About a year ago, I realized that what I was looking for wasn’t the perfect words. It was this wonder, this cacophony of nameless silence: of just sitting together, wordless but understanding, and knowing that although our moments together are fleeting and rare, they are there, adventurous nothings, and they are unexplainable, but they are perfect. Maybe that perfection wasn’t meant to be fleshed out: immortalized in words. Maybe it could lie between us, and just be.

About a year ago, I found that mere words could never constitute a whole life; they couldn’t give me a perfect silence like you could. And you know me enough to see that I love words.

But maybe I just like you a little bit more.

When are YOU going to do something?

It’s not just about the fact a person can run to be a leader of our nation and still say disgusting things about women.

It’s that there are other men who have let him. Who allowed him to spend his whole life speaking about us like we are destined to be eaten. Who thought of this attitude as honest rather than deplorable.

I’m watching you. I’m sick of boys removing themselves from the conversation because they “would never”. But you would let your friend catcall. But in the locker room or in your living room or in your frat house, you laugh when he makes the rape joke, when he talks about her like she’s inconsequential, when he removes her consent and speaks about her as if she’s a haunted house; good for a night and a story but too trapped with ghosts.

You better look down, because you’re on fire, too. You’re not free of sin because your sin was listening, an ear that excuses behavior over and over and over again until those who laugh about it begin to preform it on a personal level. Until they think they will be tolerated for criminal behavior because you tolerated them too.

The worst part is they’re right.

I want to believe in mankind. Believe he doesn’t become an rapist overnight, that only decades of business meetings or beauty contests teach him that it’s okay to be demeaning. Teach him our bodies only belong in the orbit of a boy, only mattering when we have a son.

I know how many will fold into themselves about this, hide like always in the idea you cannot change what is, that we exaggerate, that it’s not that much of a problem. That it’s not on you. Maybe it’s someone else’s problem, you won’t speak up because something in your circumstance always prevents it. That women talk about men that way sometimes, don’t they? You’ll follow rabbit holes until you come back up to sunshine without realizing you smell of nothing but gravedirt.

I’m watching you. I want to let you know you don’t get to sleep at night anymore, because none of us do. The girls you laughed about, talked about our parts as if you couldn’t tell you were slicing us into pieces. The girls who still have bruises. The women who you only see the shadow of when they stand next to their fathers or boyfriends, the two-dimensional figments of your imagination.

We are real and last night it was hard for us to breathe. All that air got snatched up by his talking. Last night we didn’t sleep. I’m not just cursing him anymore. I’m telling you the curse goes deeper. It’s every rape case you ignored, every time you waived off how offended she got by his words, every time she got uncomfortable and you did your best not to notice. I’m cursing the boy who didn’t get her back safely even though he knew about his buddy. The boy who stood in the same room as someone who spoke about her roughly and just kept drinking. I mean you.

Not all men, maybe. But all men have seen it happen.

Now the question is: when are you going to do something?