My love letter to love
Or
One moment you’re a nihilist, the next you wish you had a god to thank for this life
[July 2022]
From the bottom of my heart, from a place of pure compassion, and from an intense need to impart happiness and cherishing onto the world, I sincerely hope that every single human will one day be able to embrace and treasure the full depth and scope of how it feels to be uniquely them and how it feels to be alive.
I watched a documentary this weekend about the powerful healing and mind-expanding effects of psychedelics and MDMA. While I grow more and more convinced that I would like to try these substances one day, sooner or later, I also believe that it is worth fostering and leaning into these intense feelings of bliss and ecstasy wherever we can find them in our perfectly sober minds.
At least, I think that’s what I’m experiencing right now, as I sit at the conclusion of my weekend, reflecting on the events of the past three days. I damn near feel like crying simply to put some familiar shape to the onslaught of emotions attacking my senses with their blades made of feathers and weapons that fire soft, warm light. What I feel is a heart tearing at its seams, threatening to bounce its way out of my chest to then shred itself to smithereens from its inability to cope with all this love, beauty, and astonishment I suddenly feel.
By no means am I unfamiliar with the experience of happiness, but I don’t know if I have ever been able to plunge myself into it so profoundly as today, making all my past struggles and pains feel laughably insignificant. Of course, pain tends to do that: fade away into inconsequence given enough time, or so one hopes. But right now pain does not only feel insignificant, but indeed completely justified, even downright indispensable to have brought me to this moment that I live today.
Those who were thorns slashing into my side three weeks ago, making me bleed with fear, hurt, doubt, and insecurity, have fallen off me, my wounds freshly scabbed over. I wish to scoop them up, place a gentle kiss on their temple and tell them I am genuinely glad for the joy that they were able to squeeze out of the confines of our usual existence.
Today I feel invincible. Like I would smile and embrace death if it were to descend upon me, because all I feel is full and true. So the least I could do is to make my peace, for the sake of myself and those who would outlive me.
What it took for that is my re-claiming of my soul and body, inch by inch, loving and rejoicing in the self that I am watching unfold before my eyes. Finally listening and giving space to what I had long learned to bury within me.
Ironically, somebody who was my friend 4 weeks ago told me he wished to see me live my life for myself. This might have been the last grand piece of advice he was able to impart on me before his self-inflicted amputation from my closest circles. I am not sure whether this is what he envisioned, but I am sure that I do not regret not being able to share my joy with him now. I don’t think he would be willing or able to comprehend.
He said the only place where I was able to safely revolt was within my queerness. But I don’t think he understood that I am my queerness and my queerness is me, all-encompassing. That through my being queer, I exist as an act of protest and revolt to the rest of the world every single day. And living out that what is considered queer is neither safe nor confined to a single, abstract realm of life. But it is what has led me here today, outside of the colouring-book lines that society has drawn for us. Suddenly lost and scared, but at the same time teeming with the immense potential of painting my own pictures.
I used to toy with the ideas of nihilism, because our world felt doomed to tend toward cruelty and destruction despite our best efforts. But today I no longer feel confident exclaiming that life is meaning- and hopeless.
Despite my usual aversion to grandiose expressions of romanticism it seems that my eyes have been opened to recognize the one resource in this world which does not deplete upon use, but only multiplies.
Love.
Impart it freely and generously and not only will it bud where you sow it, but it will sprout right within your own chest repaying you hundredfold.
So, the days I may feel like slipping back into doubts about purpose and meaning, I will remind myself that if nothing else, the purpose is to love. In all its possible forms and configurations.
There is a quiet, nagging voice whispering into my ear that my fulfillment and delight cannot possibly be real. That my share of happiness is well over-drawn. That the other shoe will drop when reality comes back, knocking on my door to collect its payback with interest.
But I tune it out, now wrapping myself tightly in a blanket knit of my favorite memories, letting the dam break after all, to flood my face with tears and all of their sensations.
I know I cannot live in this feeling forever. But I learn to savor it so that I may bravely face whatever awaits me tomorrow.
Post scriptum
[July 2023]
Reading this text almost a year after I penned it, is a wonderful exercise of reflection and gratitude. So much has changed so rapidly in just about 365 days, and so much of it, if not all, was for the better. Frankly unbelievable.
For starters, I did take MDMA. It was awesome. But it was also awesome noting, that as great as it felt to float, hand in hand with my best friend, across the festival grounds of Barcelona’s biggest yearly event, that the type of happiness and ecstasy I felt in those moments were nothing unfamiliar to me. The drug didn’t unlock some hidden lair of joy I never had access to before. It just managed to concentrate a lot of the joy I was already able to incorporate into my life with ever-increasing success, into one dense, and intensely beautiful weekend.
Another awesome reflection is, that Sophie a year ago was a lot wiser than either of us really imagined. She spoke of love budding wherever you sowed it, repaying you hundred-fold. Back then, this was more of an intuition rather than something I was ever consciously aware of. Something that I was only beginning to pay proper attention to. But over the past year I have been proven right over and over and over. And I’ve started to viscerally understand the exponentially positive impacts even the smallest practices of love can have; all the while continuing to learn how to purposefully incorporate them into my day-to-day. And when I wrote about revolt last year, I did not yet know that the true act of rebellion would be to tirelessly choose love, however grandiose or miniscule, day after day, in a world that at times feels dauntingly bleak and cynical.
The Sophie a year later knows that, while the bliss comes and goes, there are so many more incredible moments lying ahead. And that the self she had started to marvel at then, outgrew herself even further, to a point that she may live all that is written here more authentically than ever.
Now I know, that the answer I had been searching for all this time, all my life, until today, had been right up there. As explicitly as one could ever ask for, among all my ramblings about love (which may have become far too soppy and romantic for my liking).
You know your purpose now. And for the first time you believe it.
Pinch yourself, you’re not dreaming.
