Maybe Love Just Needs a Pen

Finding love sometimes feels like an insurmountable journey - a doomed quest to roam the globe until you find that person, that job, that hobby, that place. That one thing that’s missing. That one hole that, once plugged, will make you feel loved. But what if love was waiting for you on the sidewalk outside your house? Or in the branch of a tree on your way to the grocery store? Or swirling past your feet in the wind?

What if finding love was so much easier than we ever thought?

I don’t have that answer, the equation that will help me feel loved, a sum I could share to help you feel loved too. But I do have a pen and I do have paper.

Sometimes, when love feels farther away than ever, I sit down with that pen and that paper, and I write love notes.

After folding them carefully into little squares, I leave my house and wander the neighborhood, tucking love into chain link fences, leaving it on window sills and in between the leaves on low-hanging branches. And I feel lighter. Like love is closer, more possible. Like maybe it’s been in my hand, all this time.

Sure, the notes might blow away or disintegrate in the rain. They might fall, unnoticed, into a crack in the bricks to grow dusty. But my hope is that each one is found by the right person at the right time. That whoever finds that note feels a quick shot of light in their day, a small burst of love that was needed right at that moment.

Maybe finding love is as simple as transcribing whatever love you have to give onto paper and scattering it wherever you happen to be.

The World Needs More Love (Notes)

The world needs a lot of things. But what it needs most is more love. If I could somehow pick up that love with my hands and mold it into a fireball or a dragon or a giant love-scattering hedgehog and unleash it on the world, I would. But since my super powers don't extend quite that far (YET), I'm going with love notes. Because sometimes the best way to pluck an intangible concept out of the ether is to take out a pen and put it on paper.

(Because you are.)

Years ago, I was in the depths of a couch-reclining, salted caramel-chomping, somewhat melodramatic despair. Magnificent though salted caramels are, they're not real good at stroking your hair and telling you you're pretty. So I rolled off the couch, sat down at my desk, swept the caramel wrappers onto the floor, and wrote a stack of love notes. Because maybe if I helped someone else feel better, I would feel better too.

If you happened to find yourself in San Francisco's Lower Haight in October of 2009, you might have spied a little square of paper tucked into a window sill or a tree branch. If you did, I hope you opened it and I hope you felt something.

I poured all the love I couldn't give myself into those notes - and, by doing so, felt infinitely better. Lighter, happier, and like those notes were tiny pinpricks of light that would guide me through the dark spot I was tangled in. I've been wanting to do this on a bigger scale ever since.

I want to scatter love notes through San Francisco and New York and everywhere else I go. I want you to start writing your own love notes and tucking them into chain link fences and taping them to telephone poles. I want our notes to be love made tangible and hand-delivered to the world, where they'll wait to be picked up by the right person at the right time. I want this to become bigger than me. Because putting more love in the world may be as simple as transcribing whatever love you have to give onto paper and scattering it wherever you happen to be.

I Have Questions

I'm in the between. The place where things are unsettled and confused and I've been unplugged from one thing but not yet plugged into the next thing. I left my apartment in LA last month, but I haven't yet decided where or how I want to settle again. I have space to travel but I haven't yet figured out how to go. I'm trying to be easier in the uncertainty of my life, while wondering if I'm not doing enough.

That's a lot of deciding and figuring and trying and wondering. Every time these dreaded -ings pop up in my brain space, I focus on what better -ings I should insert into my life. Trusting. Surrendering. Being. Especially being okay in the limbo. Taking a deep breath when my brain starts thrashing like a landed sturgeon at the idea of trusting and surrendering rather than struggling and striving. I don't know what Puritan strain has convinced me that laboring for every small thing is virtuous, but it's exhausting.

MY BRAIN IS EXHAUSTING. STOP IT, BRAIN. TAKE A NAP.

How do you create what you want without fretting about it? How do you take the action you need to take from a place that feels good rather than a place that feels panicked? How do you stop resisting and start flowing? How do you loosen your grip on the things you want so that they have a chance in hell of getting to you?

I hope you're not waiting for me to have the answers to these questions, because I really don't. All I have is another moment to do another thing and hope that it all takes me where I need to be.

In the mean time, I climb for three hours to look at this:

It's not a bad place to be for awhile.

The Art of Trusting Yourself

Trusting in yourself takes faith. Faith is a sticky business, one that requires allowing things to unfold without a guarantee. Faith isn't a toaster and it doesn't come with a warranty and I find that highly aggravating because I often miss the point of things. Trusting yourself is especially nuanced when you move against conventional norms. Several years ago, while trying to function under the weight of things I didn't understand - the way I absorb and haul other people's emotions around with me, the end of a ghastly relationship, being laid off, depression, and a bit of a drinking problem - I made the choice to get my shit together. I felt like Humpty Dumpty after he'd fallen off that brick wall. Completely shattered. With no King's Men riding to the rescue, I had to put myself back together again. I put that decision over everything else - career, relationships, and, yes, eventually even over drinking and those salted caramels I loved so much.

I put myself back together slowly and painfully and with a few side excursions into black-out booze consumption and smashing picture frames against the wall and watching the glass shatter around me. There was a reasonable swathe of 2010 where I was depressed enough to have friends tell me I needed medication - and maybe I did. I'm a big fan of medication when it helps. I've seen the magic proper pharmaceuticals can inspire. Four days a month, Midol is my best friend. But I had the very strong feeling that medication wouldn't fix what was wrong with me. And I trusted that. It wasn't a popular choice, but it felt like the right one.

Four years later, I've realized that the unpopular choice was the right one. Even though I wasn't always sure I should be trusting in myself, the me who was pretty darn broken. But I did and I'm glad. Because what I've learned since is that most of what was dragging me down wasn't even mine. I'm very sensitive to other people's energy and emotions. If you're sad or uncomfortable or in pain and we're in the same room together, I will take that on as if it were my own. Often without even realizing it. I sucked up people's negative energy and added it to my daily routine. I walked through life toting everyone else's stuff with me, like I was Ebenezer Scrooge's orphan-punting business partner, doomed to drag chains of his misdeeds for an eternity. It's hard to know what's yours when you're carrying around pieces of everyone you've ever spent time with or even passed on the street. It's hard to get shit done when you're being pressed under the weight of everyone else's emotions.

You'd think that would be useful, that I'd be more loving and caring if I understood what people around me were going through. But it wasn't. I was just socked in. A less adorable version of Eeyore, walking around under a gray cloud that had a habit of turning black and stormy before it consumed me. I was so buried, I couldn't love anyone, especially myself.

Learning how to separate myself and my emotions from those of everyone around me meant I could operate in the world on something resembling a normal level. Without the crush of everyone else's feelings, I was able to find my own emotions and deal with them. Without the dark weight, I was able to find sweetness I hadn't been able to access in years. Crawling through that gave me compassion for people who are in the midst of their own darkness, whatever it looks like.

Sometimes I wonder if medication would have helped, shortened the process or made it smoother. But then I look at my life now and I'm happy with where I am. I worked hard to get here. So I can't regret trusting what felt true. Because that was the one thing I had to cling to in the darkness - the small light of that tiny voice that said it would get better if I just kept moving.

Strange New World

Last week, I did a scary thing. By doing a scary thing, I learned that scary things don't stay scary if you keep doing them. Please note: Life tenet not guaranteed when diving out of airplanes, hopscotching through gunfire, or reading bodice rippers aloud to geriatrics.

But talking into a little camera on my laptop about things that are important to me - without a script, without editing, without deleting, without mercy for my perfection-seeking little soul - wasn't nearly as bad as I feared. So I did it again. And again. Soon, I'd done it eight times without dying. Proving to myself once and for all that doing scary things is 100% death-free.

Instead, I learned how to not sit in the dark. How to not give you an intimate tour of the inside of my cavernous nostrils. How to not care if I forget to finish a thought or the screenshot youtube chose makes me look like Nurse Ratched forgot one of my pills. I learned that I can get comfortable with something that previously made the inside of my stomach roil and my brain cells threaten to cannibalize each other. I learned that sometimes what you think matters doesn't. Because your intention can matter more than your execution and your attention can matter more than your hair.

What I Hope This Will Become

A way to connect with you in a different way. A way to explore how to let emotions help rather than hinder. A way to make this year amazing for good reasons rather than tragic ones. A way to use fear as the gateway to love. A way to crack myself open to the world. A way to step into what I truly want - and hopefully spark you to do the same.

If I can do crazy, scary, adventure-y things, so can you. If I can learn to harness my feelings and make them work for me instead of against me, so can anyone. It just takes a leap. Or a push.

I hope you join me. I hope this inspires you to go on your own adventures, to do something that scares you, to spend time crying on the floor when needed, confident that it will only make things better.

The videos are here. More is coming.