Part One: The Story of My Long and Complicated Relationship with Romance.
The year is 1998. I am a senior in college, living in the Deep South, and it's almost midnight. I am sitting on a dirt path flanked with immense, regal pines that lead up to a white plantation-style home. With impressive columns and a stately presence, the home stands in the dark, lit by moonlight.
I am crying—hugging my knees, cradling my head, tears and snot streaming down my face.
I am on the verge of graduating from college, I have a big-girl job waiting on me, and a roommate I have never met in a city I have never lived in. I am excited about what is next and at the same time there is so much uncertainty. I have had a fabulous four years in college, explored a new state and it’s culture, yet I have an internal sense that I will probably never live in Mississippi again. I am overwhelmed by the enormity of the transition. It finally feels as though I am leaving childhood and entering into adulthood. No one tells you that every fresh start has inherent loss in it, that grief is wrapped up in each new beginning.
The vast house that served as the backdrop for my midnight crying? William Faulkner's home just outside Oxford, Mississippi. I remember the night well and how dramatic and serious it felt. I wonder now if the potential drama of the scene isn't what brought me to this place. Doesn't it seem profound to be contemplating life’s next big change (and sobbing) at the footsteps of a southern estate with only the silver light of the moon to illuminate the landscape? Yes. Decidedly dramatic, quite cinematic, and definitely poetic. This is what I was going for; I am sure of that.
Another similar memory of my sensitivity to environment, beauty, and detail involved a poem I wrote about falling in love with my college boyfriend. I bought a piece of handmade paper at a local gift shop, picked a few camellia flowers from a bush growing on my college campus, dried the petals, and then affixed them to the paper in a cascade around the words. Get it? Falling petals, falling words, falling in love with you. I was what's called a hopeless romantic, though I have never liked that phrase due to it’s saccharine insinuation. Back then, I sent handwritten letters on delicate stationery, picked wildflowers for my desk, read poetry, and decorated in airy linen and pale florals. I listened to Nora Jones on repeat.
These stories capture the unapologetically romantic spirit I had through my late teens and college years. Then I hit adulthood, and poof, this part of me no longer felt she had permission to hang around. If I had a corporate job, meeting with Important People talking about Important Things, I couldn't also be a romantic. I could not see how my pragmatic professional parts could mix with my softer and more tender parts. There is a lot of social norming and gender conditioning swirling in this story, and this is where it really shows up. I thought that I had to choose as a woman: either weak and romantic or strong and professional. I was embarrassed by my "hopeless romantic" side, associating it with being juvenile and counter to my business-mindedness, or even how adults really lived. I mean, can you really work a 9-5 job, commute, work out at the gym, eat a frozen Lean Cuisine dinner—and still live romantically? (The answer to this question comes in a separate blog titled, “The story of my long and complicated relationship with romance. Part Two” coming in the next blog drop) I had absorbed the message that this part of me was "too cheesy" and had nowhere to live in the fast-paced world of adulting I had become a member of. Successful businesswomen did not write poetry during their downtime.
So I shut her down and hid her away.
It felt like survival to hide her and throw away the key, but it was also confusing and sad. In this exiling, my authentic self lost part of her tender soul. The part that notices small beauties, pauses to take inspiration from the watercolored morning sky, sends travel postcards on every trip, and trusts in abundance. I gave up the part that lived more slowly and more freely. She lead with love and openness. She believed in wonder and, therefore, experienced it.
When I let her go, I began the lost years. I was lost without her, living, but not living the most authentic version of myself. For years, I walked around with the nagging feeling that I had forgotten something yet never figured out what it was. I longed for acceptance and avoided other people's discomfort with my romantic tendencies. I let other people's rejection of their own tenderness and vulnerabilities override my natural way of being. Their discomfort with me was a reflection of discomfort with themselves. Yet by hiding her, I had no chance of feeling acceptance because I had inadvertently disrupted my foundation of self-acceptance. If I couldn't accept myself in my most natural state, how could anyone else?
Like most humans, I exiled a part of myself that I didn't think was acceptable. Almost all of us do this; I just didn't know it at the time. It can be any part of our identity: our culture, heritage, spirituality, trauma, creativity, the bullied part, or the part that needs others. We all have some aspect of our identity we simply don't like, have trouble accepting, or brings us pain, so we try to kick that part out. It rarely works and causes more problems than it actually solves (but try telling that to your subconscious).
This "romantic" part of me, dormant for two decades, came alive again in little rumbles. Little flutters. I would take a chance here or there and lean into my softer, more tender side. Share a sentiment with vulnerability—heart open. Over the course of several years, through individual therapy, reading and writing poetry again, lots of time in nature, hours of self-reflection, and my journey to becoming a therapist, I slowly began to revive this part that was presumed dead but only frozen in time.
I slowly reclaimed her by understanding that other people's discomfort with this old fashioned, open, loving part of me is not my problem to solve.
In fact, this creative, expressive, abundant, beauty-seeking, hopeful part of me is just what the world needs more of. Slowly I began to feel that maybe my romantic side is tied up in my greatest gift: seeing that there is good in all of us, seeking connection and community, expressing creativity, and noticing that its often small, simple moments that create a fulfilling life. Without this part, I couldn't live wholeheartedly or offer my gifts to the world. Maybe, just maybe, other people's queasy response to vulnerability and tenderness is not my issue to figure out. And maybe, just maybe, those who receive my open embrace are my people, and the others aren't. Maybe my whole self, with all her parts reunited, is not a problem at all.
Last year, I did something I have done repeatedly for the past two decades: I searched online for a book whose title and author I couldn't remember. Unsurprisingly, with no exact information, the search has always come up empty. The book, absent from my shelves and an emblem of my whole authentic self, was lent to a friend 25 years ago and never returned. It is a book of love letters. Yes, love letters. The epitome of my "cheesy" self. I adore this book and its pages filled with replicated copies of love letters written through the centuries by known historical figures and unknown romantics like me. A book capturing a time when writing letters was part of daily rhythms and something everyone had the experience of sending and receiving. There’s something special about having a tangible thing to go back to. Re-reading and deciphering the sender’s thoughts and longings has always intrigued me and stirred up nostalgia for an era I never lived in. Reading the letters in this book, with its dreamy images of impressionist paintings and slanting cursive, is a direct path to my true nature.
Finally, I found the book, Love Letters: An Anthology of Passion, compiled by Michelle Lovrie, in an obscure online bookshop and wasn't even sure I would receive it from the sketchy-looking website. I paid a stupid amount of money for an out-of-print book from a maybe-not-legitimate website—and I was filled with hope that I would get to saunter through the pages once again. I kept imagining what it would be like to hold this book again—to hold myself again.
When the book was delivered to my house in its less-than-perfect, well-worn condition, I put a kettle on, made a cup of tea, announced to my family that my "love letters book" had arrived, ignored their sniggers, and got into the coziest spot in my house to savor every page. I was home in myself, all my parts nurtured and welcomed—revived and reunited at long last—without apology.
Enjoy the slow- Heather