It’s Valentine’s Day so I would like to share a few thoughts on love and the perception of love.
Essentially, love has an algorithm. So does everything else in life whether it's biological or something else.
Now, I am not the master of love and in many cases, find it just as confusing as the next person.
However, one thing I have learned is that love is not a place or goal toattain but an action you must take daily. It’s the same with happiness. You can’t find it, you have to become it.
Love and happiness are choices. You choose to do them. Not many people realize this and once they do, their lives encounter a profound change — especially if this person has had an incredibly hard life.
Trauma Often Corrupts Love
A tough life normally ensures that you are mentally and emotionally programmed to fail. I think this is why many people hurt one another.
When trauma and pain are all that you know, you tend to execute that program onto every situation and person you encounter in life — autonomously; not intentionally.
I was essentially programmed to fail. And I almost did — many times. I’ve beaten death three times in my life with two of those times being suicide attempts.
What Is Love?
What is true love, exactly? We are taught that it’s the white picket fence, the ultimate success, and happiness. And if you don’t achieve those, you are a failure in life. We need to unlearn that while also understanding that failure is neither good nor bad.
For most of my life, m mother struggled with severe PTSD and trauma and one of the core lessons I learned in life was how to be a victim.
She didn’t intentionally teach me this, but it was through her actions and the actions of close relatives at the time that taught me that I was undeserving of being here. That I was a burden. That I didn’t deserve to be alive. I actually had family members tell me this. I had to unlearn all of that and it’s been a painful lesson to me.
I had to realize that as a result of some of the things that happened to me, I developed a victim mentality where I would basically be the victim in every situation of my life.
Unlearning victim mentality is the hardest thing, I think, ever. And if you tell someone that they have it, they get defensive. I sure did the first time one of my close friends told me that.
Healing from victim mentality doesn’t mean you invalidate the things that have happened to you.
It means you understand that you have control over your own reactions and actions and can stop the program that was started by the initial traumas.
Taking accountability for those actions you have control over is extremely hard but once you are able to do this, you realize that you have something that as a victim you’d never had before. Power.
Power to change your life for the better.
With power comes the knowledge that it’s okay to fail. Failure is another tool to gain knowledge about a situation.
What Is Love?
If love isn’t the happy couple with a family, success, wealth, or the illusion of such? Then what is it?
I think that there are two versions of love — one of which isn’t love at all.
The first version of love, which is so rare because many misunderstand it, is the choice.
We choose to be it. It leads our hearts and our actions.
The other, more common version that many allude to a game or being painful, is the perceived notion of love where you have to do all of these things to get it and if you do those things and fail, then something must be wrong with you.
The reason why ‘true love’ is so rare is that people don’t really take the time to be it. We think it is silly to ‘love ourselves’ or project what we think love is onto others and get upset with them when they don’t meet our requirements.
Another compound to the problem of the second version is that we are often punished for being loving. We are taught that we don’t deserve it, called simps for supporting it, and are laughed at when we fail at it. Look at Kanye West and Kim K for example. People are making memes out of their pain.
If you want to find love, you literally have to stop looking. And start being. The best way is to define what love means to you and apply those actions to your daily life.
This requires deeply knowing yourself and being able to take accountability for all of the situations in your life — the parts that you have control over. You can’t understand how to love yourself while still having a victim mentality.
Another key part is listening to your emotions instead of feeling them. When you feel a certain way, ask yourself why. And write down the answers. Your emotions serve as guides and can be intense, but you can learn to navigate them.
Emotions teach us what our thought patterns are. Thought patterns are kind of like algorithms in a computer — a program. Understanding your emotions will help you crack the code in your own mental programming.
