Dear Mama, I Got Sick And Found bell hooks.
Nothing makes you feel more alone than coughing up a lung on a couch and recognizing that the way you learned to love may not be "correct".
Let me set the scene shall we, its Monday morning I am feeling a little meh and chalking it up to having had a very fun weekend spent with family and a little too many libations and edible arrangements if you catch my drift and BAM! I am sitting in my office trying to figure out why I am hot, yet cold, shivering AND sweating and low and behold ya girl has been caught. NOT BY A MAN but some bitch named covid. Now the hypochondriac in me is panicking, I am beyond shook that I have actually managed to get Covid and now I don’t feel like a bad bitch - if anything I feel like a sad bitch mixed with a contagious btich and I DO NOT LIKE IT!
VERY ACCURATE DEPICTION OF ME THE LAST WEEK.
I have everything I think I need…an insane amount of books on my TBR, plenty of coffee beans, and enough money to put in a few orders on doordash. Covid can’t hold me down….BAHAHA. Yeah, she got me good because while I had all of these little luxuries to keep myself busy all I could think about was why it took me so long to reach out and ask for an extra hand. Why did I feel the need to pretend I could handle this by myself? Why did it feel like pulling teeth to shoot a text to my mom that asked her to grab me groceries and put them in the backyard for me to pick up?
While I haven’t been able to unpack that train of though with my therapist just yet I think I figured it out by diving head first into ‘all about love’ by bell hooks over the last week - where my eyes were inevitably opened and I learned that the lens I view love in is not the healthiest way to look at it. Love, real love should come with conditions and accountability and that illusive sense of coming home to yourself.
Hooks wrote,
“It took me a long time to recognize that while I wanted to know love, I was afraid to be truly intimate. Many of us choose relationships of affection and care that will never become loving because they feel safer. The demands are not as intense as loving requires. the risk is not as great.”
As I tabbed, highlighted AND wrote in the margins of this passage I felt seen - I have always wanted to be loved fully without having to sacrifice too much of myself, without having to get too intimate because I was afraid to know myself in that space of vulnerability. But that begs the question, do I actually want to be loved if I can’t allow myself that space to let the ugly out instead of hiding behind it.
While I am not close to finishing this book because I am taking my time to sit with each chapter, to fully process what it is bell hooks wants us to take from it, I am open to fully understanding all about love and what part that will play in my life now and in the future but it is my hope it will also teach me of the past versions of myself, the versions so unlovable it was easier to bury them deep and pretend they didn’t exist.
I am but a work in progress and this book has reminded me of the fact. How humbling.