008: Love.
You are hardwired for love, so it is absolutely normal that you desire it. What is not normal is becoming so shaped by trauma that you lose sight of love when it is already present—when you slip into self-preservation mode and can no longer recognize love as a gift as common as the air you breathe.
The easier thing to do is to remember your worst decisions, the people who betrayed you, or those who never returned what you gave. But love is just as present on the other side of those memories. When people say love is everywhere, it is not merely a cliché—it is inherently true. Love is all around, if you choose to notice it. It is not just an abstract force we were taught holds the world together (even though it does). Love is also uncomfortably precise, oddly sufficient enough to meet every single human being on earth where they are. Love is near—it is this astonishingly specific redirection of force from such a vast place like the world into the sacred arithmetic of one soul: your own. And that is, sometimes, what also makes it impossible to believe.
There is a person who carries the intricate details of you within their hearts, as though something of you is quietly mirrored in them beyond the limits of your own awareness. There are people—friends, family, partners—who, amid bills to pay, tasks to finish, deadlines to meet, emails to send, and a thousand competing urgencies, still believe that you are all that matters at the end of the day.
When people say they love you, when people do things to show you that they truly do, believe them as readily as you believe the opposite. When love shows up—in whatever shape, form, or size—lower the veil and let yourself be seen.