Showing back up to be loved

Spaces where we can come as we are

I wrote a book over the last year and learned about love while doing it.

I had never written something so longform before. I remember feeling nervous that the will to do it would evaporate from me, like I’d wake up one morning and have no more ideas, remember that I was terrible at describing what rooms looked like (still true), or be so overwhelmed with humiliation that I’d just stop. To outrun the chance of evaporation, I set bold and insane goals to finish the first draft in six months, which basically happened. 

Writing was easiest when I returned to it every day. For an hour in the morning or a few at night, I’d look at what I wrote the day before, give it a second coat of paint, and write a few hundred brand new words. Repeat the next day. 

I had a realization about the beauty of this, just now, while taking my laundry out of the dryer and instantly dropping my socks in a pile of spiders and dust: this was a sort of sacred – if solitary – space where I could show back up, every day, and try again.

Spaces like that are a little miracle, aren’t they? To return somewhere every day and look what you made in the face – seeing what could be better, yeah, but then just sitting with it and making it better. Accepting your failures and smiling at your growth.

Trying to love yourself for showing up again anyway.

What other spaces in our lives feel like that? Where we can love ourselves, become more healed, sweeter versions of ourselves, and do so when returning to the same place often, day after day, being accepted as we are?

Where you can show up joyful or not speak to anyone, where your expression and energy can evolve over time and there is no “one” or “best” version of you?

Where there is collective memory of you to hold you up, keep you accountable, and reminisce about?

Where your whole self is loved as you grow – not in service of forever optimizing, but in service of things happening and lessons being learned over time?

Where it’s a little Olive Garden (when you’re here you’re family), a little Statue of Liberty (Give me your tired, your poor), a little Cheers, a little AA, a little church even after you’ve skipped a few Sundays?

Where, most importantly: there is continuity?

Continuity is rare! It is so much easier to experience one-offs, transactions, wandering from one space to another like a drifter and beginning again somewhere new as someone new. And there’s good in that too. But there is loss in the starting over. Threads and histories, contexts for ourselves and others. How many spaces do we only choose to be our best selves in? What do we miss out on learning about ourselves? On learning how much we can be accepted? 

I’m thinking of where we return again and again most organically in our lives, and the sites and third spaces are the same as always – work, school, church? Gym? Mostly work and school. 

But “space” could also be a goopy quality here – friendship is a space, family, therapy, the same walking loop we go on in our neighborhood every morning. 

They’re the places where we show up and maybe change, maybe don’t, but maybe something beautiful happens in the simple act of returning day after day as we are. 

How do we support spaces like this? For ourselves, in our friendships, in the places where we physically and digitally share space? Where does transactionality in our spaces serve us and where does reinventing ourselves, one-offing into infinity, never being known, begin to falter?

I hope people don’t forget about me and move on, joked a friend when they were about to go on a month-long trip, that’s my biggest fear

I made this joke back to them when I was on a trip recently and they responded We could never

That is the kind of space I want to be in and make for other people.

I hope they and me and you can all locate the places where we can show back up and be loved in. I hope we make them, enjoy them, and don’t take them for granted where we have them.

What does it feel like when you’re able to show back up and be loved? Where does that happen? Where do you wish it did?

Enjoy this complementary Carole King jam to support the feelings of sentimentality and homecoming this might have inspired in you. Carole has truly got a song for every feeling!!!!!! Snooooow is cooooold, raaaaain is wet 🎵

Or why don’t you share this with someone who you want to create a loving space with?