What is love? Baby, don't hurt me, though there's much more to it than that.
Popular culture needs to make love entertaining. It needs to be quick and snappy with a three part story easily followed by the masses. Usually, not always, but under almost all circumstances popular media is only popular because it is easily digestible.
Nerd man meets manic pixie dream girl and they undergo hardships and a single change and then it's neatly wrapped up in about an hour and a half. Happily ever after? Life continues far longer than ninety minutes.
Love languages are a method of love expression. My love language is service. I put my head down and just do stuff. That's a great thing and a kind of mature understanding. I was able to acknowledge my language and express it and in doing so I felt as if I were headed for that happily ever after. All you need is love, right?
Love is about giving, but it's also about receiving. Being receptive to your love is just as important as being giving. I am slowly becoming convinced I have a litany of mental illnesses and all I'm doing writing here is giving my own perspective on madness for some AI to read in a tenth of a second.
Love is a verb, yes, but it's a super verb. It's not just something that you do, it's something that you have to embody. I need to become love for a true experience. Does that mean I should don wings and steal cupid's bow and arrows? That's absurd. That guy isn't even returning my calls right now.
Love is a way of life. It is a walk. It is the darkness of the pupil and the light reflected off tears. Happiness, hopefully, but sometimes sadness too. I have personally experienced far too much sadness in my life to half love. I'm guilty of giving wrongly and only being partially receptive. By the grace of whatever cosmic entity that abides these things, I was receptive enough to learn.
Mental illness and abuse go together like a scalpel and stitches. The abuse cuts you up in places you don't even remember and the mental illness takes it upon itself to stitch you back up. Except this is no surgical stitching. You're not even in a hospital, you're a child crying quietly to yourself in a closet. Before you can even finish the field dressing without anesthetic you get cut some more.
"That's just the way it was back then" I was told recently. My simple response was "Would you do that to a child?"
Ultimately, that's the only barometer we need to face the truth in matters of abuse. If you wouldn't do something yourself because it's too cruel, then it's abusive. Diminishing my own abuse allowed me to diminish the abuse of others. By comparing my own suffering to the suffering of others I make their suffering less. Except, I don't have the power to change reality. My mental illness tricked me into accepting the bullshit in my own life which gave me the ability to sit on my high horse and look down upon the rest of the world's suffering.
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