Splash No. 258 - To Be Loved
To Be Loved
The book has a fun little name and a cute cover of an orange tissue box. Based on those alone, I went into it expecting a light, slightly humorous memoir about a therapist and the zany adventures she had with some of her patients. Instead, reading Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb was a deeply moving experience, a deep dive into the darkness of the human experience and how we learn to cope with it. So many aspects of the book continue to bounce around in my head, but Gottlieb’s conversations with her cancer-ridden patient Julie stuck with me the most. As she faced her certain death, Julie began to write her own obituary.
A few weeks ago, Julie finished writing her obituary. We were in the midst of some important conversations at the time, talking about how she wanted to die. Who did she want with her? Where did she want to be? What would she want for comfort? What was she afraid of? What kind of memorial service or funeral did she want? What did she want people to know and when? [...]
In considering her obituary, we talked about what meant the most to her.[...]
Which is why, in the end, after several drafts and revisions, Julie decided to keep her obituary simple: “For every single day of her thirty-five years,” she wanted it to read, “Julie Callahan Blue was loved.”
Julie was an accomplished professor who had overcome much in her life, yet at the end of her too-short life, she only had one sentence to share. With her time ticking away, she found love to be more important than anything else in her life — what she wanted to be remembered for. When facing the end, I imagine that most things fade away in importance: the small annoyances and worries must feel so trivial, the work that takes up most of our days, everything except love.
I found this passage to be instructive. My life lately hasn’t been geared towards love as much as I’d like, as my thoughts about work seep into my free time and beyond. And what good does staying up to date with submarines get me in the grand scheme of things? I don’t live a loveless life, but there’s always room for more love, and searching for it feels like a more worthy purpose than any I’ve had recently.
I’m blessed to have been born into a loving family who never makes me doubt how much I matter to them. I didn’t grow up having a lot of close friends and my familial love felt like plenty. Yet, as I grew older and started to exist in the world without my family always nearby, I sought to find more love, which didn’t succeed as much as I wish it did.
With my failures in finding love among friends, or as friendships withered, I started to question whether I deserved my family’s unconditional love for me. They felt like some strange exception to some sort of rule about who deserved love in their lives. Even as I reciprocated and attempted to be a great brother, son, etc., I would feel strange about the fact that I did nothing to earn this love other than exist and be who I am. This must’ve been some capitalist brainwashing about how everything must be earned, but, ultimately, I would discover that this is what made it meaningful, more so than other forms of love.
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I learned to love art when I took an art history class and discovered that people have always created art to revere what they love and to share that love with others. People would create new things to share their emotions and ideas in new forms, and both the creators and the consumers could see the world with new eyes. These new eyes could adore in new ways. Art would create more love, and more love can’t be bad.
I think I must’ve become interested in creating art to find more love in my life because I started around the time I started to question the love I already had in my life. Maybe I’m giving my younger self more credit, but it seems reasonable that my lonely teenage self would be seeking something greater than the satisfaction of putting words on a page or taking photos or whatever else I got into. The experience of creation was wonderful, but I’ve always been a deeply impatient artist — one who is more interested in finishing and sharing a piece than getting it to match some ideal state from my head.
And so, in those early days, and sometimes even now, a given work of art that I create is a bid for love. In these pieces, I offer parts of myself in hopes that I can receive small acknowledgments that I exist, that I offered something, that I’m worthy of the simplest form of love: attention.
I think I already could say that I’ve been loved every day of my life, but I think it’s worth being greedy here. I’d like to be loved even more and to offer my love even more. I’d like to create more art and share it with whoever would like to see it and be satisfied with all the love I’d leave behind when it’s all said and done.
Drops of the Week
ALBUM - Modal Soul by Nujabes - going back to the godfather of lo-fi
POEM - "Visitors from Abroad" by Louise Glück - Who would call in the middle of the night? / Trouble calls, despair calls. / Joy is sleeping like a baby.
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Love,
Nikhil