love's not punk (first draft)

sometime in the last year, something within me changed. i find myself overwhelmed with love for the people in my life. i cried all day at a friend's bridal shower a few weeks ago. i can't even make it through an episode of grey's anatomy without choking back tears.

when i told my mom i thought i was broken,  she said you are not broken, you are grown up. you are looking at the world around you and seeing the possibility for your future. you are appreciating the human experience.

emotion is described on dictionary.com as an "affective state of consciousness." feeling is a form of consciousness, something that lets us know we are human. we fear pyscho- and sociopaths because they lack empathy. horror books and movies villainize the rise of unfeeling robots and computers. almost every romantic movie delves into the pitfalls of unspoken love between two people. stories of people like kitty genovese, who died because of social indifference, are widely televised.


 
and yet every day, i am amazed at the indifference i see in the city around me. by the time we are teenagers, we have been trained by society not to show people that we care. it's cool to not give a shit about anything. it's easy to numb yourself to pain, to keep others in the dark about who you really are and what's going on inside you. when i was in high school, i wanted to be blase. in training to be indifferent, i didn't tell anyone i loved them or permit myself to hate. i learned to love in the dark.

but when you are 16 and your mom gets her own room in the ICU of Mayo Clinic,
when you are 17 and your best friend gets so guilty she stops eating,
when you are 18 and you are alone, hundreds of miles from home,
when you are 19 and the only boy you've ever loved puts a gun to his head,
you have to stop loving in the dark.

eighteen

i held the bloody hand of a boyfriend after he punched a hole through his door big enough to match the hole in his heart. i watched friend after friend break down, drop out, lock themselves away. i saw family members betrayed and stomped on by people they trusted. i witnessed my mom cry for the first time. these experiences taught me that telling someone to chin up, to feel better, to stop crying, denies the right to having that emotion, the right to humanness.

your emotions are important and relevant. you are not less valid for waking up crying or pissing yourself laughing. you are not stupid or childish for being so happy you could scream or being mad enough to break an entire china set. cool indifference is bullshit. letting yourself become numb only works for so long.



i never saw my best friend cry until she fell in love with someone her parents hated. somewhere between putting her family relationships at risk and knowing it was the right thing to do, she grew up, became secure enough to be vulnerable. she was 19.

the summer before i moved to chicago, my mom covered up her sorrow so severely that i thought she didn't care that i was leaving until she broke down a week before i left. she was 44.

my great-grandma spent the better part of her life spewing disdain and dressing herself in callousness. when she got dementia in old age, she forgot how to be indifferent. she cried, told us she loved us, asked us to stay with her. she was 92.

it has taken me 20 years, a lot of heartache, and my best friend saying, "i am so glad you wrote this" to get here, to this paradigm shift. to realize that apathy is overrated. to appreciate my own very human experience. to bleed compassion. to let love in.

i always used to stress out about whether or not i was happy, whether or not i was still a good person, whether or not i was whole. in the last year i have come to recognize that as long as your emotions aren't permitting you to harm others, you are still a good person. that the point of life is not to be happy or whole, it is to be chipped and broken and real. to appreciate the ups and downs of being a fallible living creature who has the very special privilege of experiencing emotion.




following is a collection of quotes i have found relating to this topic as well as lyrics, art, stories, and poems that were submitted to me by my friends and colleagues for use in this zine.