Usually, when things go south, I write on my Substack. A page dedicated to things I find good enough for me, so I always have a reason to notice them and excitedly tell my three subscribers. The page I started to “not rot” (as a TikTok content creator said in her videos about overcoming the death of her mother) after the passing of my father plunged me into a strange state of looming depression.
I was about to write about my recent find; Mitski’s new album, specifically the song My Love Mine All Mine. But it was more than good enough for me.
It reminds me of the biggest, long-term goal in my life. Some self-help books might call them ikigai. My reason and my purpose to live. The slicing in the Venn diagram between what I do for a living, what I love to do, and what I want to contribute to society (to badly sum it up, there are a bunch of other elements in it). I realize that what I want to do in life is amplify the stories that people pass by amidst the chaos of a world on the brink of extinction. The pain that people feel in secret, the love they can’t pass on, and the grief they keep clinging on to like used-up sweaty tissue at a music festival. Eventually, what I’m aiming for is to contribute to building a more compassionate world. Everyone can experience female-friendship-type love regardless of gender, express their love freely—even as small as complimenting someone’s outfit, and parents are filling the ginormous cups of the love that every child needs, no buts.
Out of the many battles I fought, whether at work, with myself, with bigoted Twitter incels, or with my brother, I realized that the only fight that matters is the one I did out of love (and for love). Not that I have many, though, since I’ve always been the one who gave up and asked to be left alone. But in the end, those are the ones that matter, because those fights led to friends showing up at my dad’s funeral and staying until 3 AM, led to 4 years of a fun and healthy relationship, and led to a bi-monthly 3-hour meet-up with girlfriends to talk about grief.
The fight itself is a fight between the people I love and what keeps me apart from them. Because there’s always a deck to finish before 10 PM, always an urge to shut in, and always a new film I want to catch alone. But none of them matters because, at the end of the day, I’m in my tiny room, reading All About Love by Bell Hooks or revisiting my 8-month class notes on reconciliation and building a compassionate community, alone — without anyone I can share them to.
I’ve been selfishly keeping all my love to myself. To be fair, I’ve been deprived of love from myself for years — but still, it is much more needed out there in a world that is unforgivingly lonely and hostile.
I want to love people in a way that I’ve been perfecting, practicing it on myself first like a mad scientist injecting her own experiment into her veins. A right mix of validation, respect, freedom, and what I learned recently: resilience. I want my way of loving to be felt not just by myself, to resonate even when I’m not around. Because, after all, it’s the only thing I can truly give to the people I cherish in my life.
As Mitski wrote:
“Cause my love is mine, all mine.
I love, my, my, mine.
Nothing in the world belongs to me
But my love, mine, all mine, all mine.”
In a publication shortly after the release of her album, The Land is Inhospitable and So Are We, she said that life would be easier without hope or a soul to love. But she realizes that love is the only thing that is truly hers. A force that is immortal, like atoms, can’t be demolished or repossessed. The only thing left after she dies will be her love, haunting the land. Reading it flipped a switch in me that had recently become too far out of reach.
I grew up a loving people-pleaser, I fall in love easily with people, both platonically and romantically. I fell in love with small aspects of life, I walked on eggshells trying to make people happy, and I even lost myself in the process. Stepping into adulthood, I’ve been burned out; that part of me died and turned into ashes. And in a desperate effort to awaken the dead, I do the exact opposite of what I was supposed to do (I thought that was the right way; what are we supposed to figure out by the age of 25, anyway?).
Suddenly, I’m in my late 20s, facing grief after grief. Just when I thought I couldn’t lose anything more and things couldn’t get any worse, life did exactly that. Just when I thought I'd had a better grip on a shattered world after my dad died, it shattered into smaller pieces I could barely touch. And in the middle of it came the realization that I'd been doing everything wrong. When I don’t have anything I can cling to, I have my love—the love that now I don’t know where to put because most of my friends became consequences of me burning bridges out of impatience and weakness.
Maybe with grief—so, so much grief—comes along so much love. After all, they said, grief is love in a heavy coat, and the internet is filled with quotes from that TV show (Wandavision?) about how grief is love persevering.
Perseverance is what I learned in this god-knows-which phase of grief—and, albeit late, still at the right time. I’ve been frustrated, not knowing what to do to be my old, loving self. I guess this is something I have to learn the hard way (no, the hardest way); maybe it's karma for always leaving people behind for lack of perseverance.
Every time things start to turn into shit, my best friends and I always joke, “What is God forcing me to learn this time?”
So I guess there it is—I got my answer.
