The main dish…
“In this moment, are you letting yourself be led by fear or by love?”
From the musical, Tick, Tick, Boom
This is a lovely question to inspect at crucial moments of our lives - are we being guided by love or by fear? Are we choosing so we don’t lose what we have? Or are we submitting to the self-debilitating power and magic of love?
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Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler - people behind the five stages of grief - also wrote about this in their book, LIFE LESSONS: Two Experts on Death and Dying Teach Us About the Mysteries of Life and Living.1
It’s true that there are only two primary emotions, love and fear, but it’s more accurate to say that there is only love or fear, for we cannot feel these two emotions together, at exactly the same time. They’re opposites. If we’re in fear, we’re not in a place of love. When we’re in a place of love, we cannot be in a place of fear. Can you think of a time when you’ve been in both love and fear? It’s impossible.
All of our invented fears involve either the past or the future; only love is in the present. Now is the only real moment we have, and love is the only real emotion because it’s the only one that occurs in the present moment. Fear is always based on something that happened in the past and causes us to be afraid of something we think may happen in the future. To live in the present, then, is to live in love, not fear. That’s our goal, to live in love.2 And we can work toward that goal by learning to love ourselves. Infusing ourselves with love begins the washing away of our fears.
I actually hate this. I find this idea of love and fear being opposite, mutually exclusive emotions ‘self-evidently silly’3. In my experience, fear and love have always coexisted together like loyal partners. The very act of love is informed by a deep-seated fear of loss. There’s a persistent and gnawing fear of losing the love - the source, form or magnitude of it. I imagine myself in love like I am holding onto love like holding onto a bunch of heavy groceries and no bag. If I lose my grip, one by one, everything will begin to fall..
If you know me, you are thinking, “Uno, this is because you saw someone you love pass away recently. So.. of course, you are scared that other people will die too.” Well, yes, of course. I regularly spend nights in worry over the well-being of my loved ones. If my mom is ever driving from place A to B and back, I find it hard to focus on anything until I know she has reached back home safely. If I go to a new place, I ask about the nearest hospital. My weekend chores include outlining my grand will. Last week, I spent 25 minutes discussing why (and to whom) I want to give away my journals after I die. So, yes, sure. I am very much being ‘led by fear’ at this point in my life. Has this fear of losing someone else prevented new love? May be? I am not an egotistical maniac. This is not the hill I want to die on. I can accept that being in the thick of grief may affect my aversion to the idea that fear and love are opposite emotions. Those are my priors to this issue. But now, kindly allow me to make my case.
I insist that we feel both love and fear together. I resist the general positive/negative spectrum of emotions but I think it’s specially inaccurate and harmful here. Why is love positive and fear negative? Haven’t we felt incredibly painful and ‘ugly’ emotions of anger, envy and distraught because we felt love and feared that we would lose it? My love will and has always been guided by fear. One cannot possibly love fearlessly. To love is to accept the fear of loss. To love is to hold and guard preciously what you know will destroy you at some point in life or death.
as if what exists, exists
so that it can be lost
and become precious.In Passing by Liesel Mueller
Over a year ago, in another country, a heart-broken woman sat across my bed and baffled at the unwarranted cruelty of break-ups. You love someone; you’ve designed your entire life and routine around them; and when you decide that you shouldn’t be together in the earlier way, in one clean and sudden sweep.. it’s over? You’re supposed to redesign your whole life and sweep out all the affection you feel for them because you’ve just ‘broken-up’. She pledged to never do this again. I gave her hot cinnamon tea, agreed on the need to legislate for gentler break-ups, smiled gloatingly many times, and assured her that she will certainly love again.
And then, last night, I was right there. I texted a friend, “I am so young and I feel like I’ll NEVER fall in love again, which I know is a lie but IT FEELS SO REAL. IT IS SO SILLY! Sometimes I think I hate him for putting me through this. Like how dare he! But then the feeling passes and I’m like it’s fine it’s not a crime to not love me lol. BUT IT SHOULD BE 🤪.”
When we choose to live - and we make that decision every day - we also choose the kind of life we want to live. I know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross meant that ‘being led by fear’ can often prevent us from simply trying. But is the resolution here to 'lead with love', whatever hell that even means? Or is the resolution in the acceptance of the fear and even in the imagination of the loss? That we may fail and lose everything we hold so precious. And that will destroy us. But from that rubble too, we will emerge okay. And if we don’t fail at that attempt, we may find immense joy, success and love. But we will fail at something else, and that could break our soul. Vicious, inescapable, Sisyphean, but also the best feeling in the world for which no price is too high. Not even grief. A ‘khubsoorat bala’4 if there ever was one. Truly, grief is the price we pay for love5.
It’s an honour to be in grief. It’s an honour to feel that much, to have loved that much.
Liz Gilbert
The sides…
Recommendation corner:
The gentlest poem, Love Is A Place by E. E. Cummings:
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
[TW - discussing weight loss in the bullet below. skip to the poem with a screenshot if you want to avoid that :) ]
Internet is always forcing us into ethical dilemmas. New weight loss drugs are throwing even the tiniest of work we may have done on body acceptance into the garbage. If you’re caught in this mess, oh do I feel you. I highly recommend Mikaila Jamison’s newsletter on body image discourse and specially for this. I loved her advice to, “figure out what your values are and act accordingly.” It’s not straight and simple. It’s very hard, actually.
A good way to figure out your values and whether you might need to adjust them is something else Jessica DeFino told me: Every time you get an urge to participate in something, some sort of beauty behavior or a negative thought about yourself and your body, just keep asking, “Why?”
Why do you feel the need to have the same body as the people around you? Why do you think your life will be better if you lose 11 pounds? Why is a drug a better choice than some other means of action? Why is it important to you to reject any intentional interventions? Where do all of these motivations come from? Do they serve you first and foremost?
Stop asking questions about the behaviors of celebrities and start asking questions about yourself.In another piece, she said:
I can admit why I’ve cared about a celebrity or anyone else’s body before: Grappling with my own body image makes me insane, I’m insecure and emotionally and psychologically damaged about my body, and it can be a relief to fire some of that energy outward … Any time I’ve been in my feelings about someone else’s body for simply existing, it’s because I’m envious, it’s because I’ve felt it a great injustice that they “get” something I don’t have, it’s because I understand that our culture places a premium on looking a certain way and that way is not achievable for me or most people without a great many expensive or time and money-consuming interventions or cosmic blessings. I’ve had to realize that these feelings come from what I’ve been taught—that a predetermined idea of beauty is the most important thing about me—and that it will likely not be the case in my lifetime that this unfair reality will change. Some people just get all the luck. All I can do is work to unlearn what I’ve been taught and divest from the idea that a celebrity’s body - UB edit: ANYONE’S BODY - has anything to do with mine.
If you’re interested in the science and fatphobia of the new weight loss drugs, read here.
Everything Is A Sign Today by Amanda Moore.
The Oedipus Trap, a far more interesting concept than the Oedipus Complex.
..the story of Oedipus, who killed his father and married his mother… this wasn’t really his fault; he didn’t know who they were. But that didn’t stop his mother from hanging herself when she found out, or Oedipus from gouging out his own eyes. There are some mistakes no one can live with, no matter how innocently they were made.
Thus the trap: If you have made such a mistake, it is obviously better not to know you have done so. And as Feynman said, you are the easiest person to fool. Which, of course, raises the disquieting question: What Oedipus traps might we have stumbled into unawares? And more importantly, if we have, how do we get out?
Questionnable screenshots
I downloaded a dating app last week so my screenshot folder is full of messages boys have sent me by way of flirting. It’s too soon to find them funny so I will simply refrain. Meanwhile, please enjoy.. laughing at me.
This snip that spoke to the insides of my soul from Alison Roman’s “I love baking, I hate baking. it's wonderful, it's the absolute worst.”
That’s it for this edition of Uno’s Thought Scramble. Thank you for making it this far. If you liked it, let me know. If you have ✨Thoughts✨, let me know. If it didn’t impress you, let me know. If you hated it, please leave me alone.
~
Hunched over my laptop at my friend’s living room couch, feeling the body ache of a fever that’s about to fully soak in,
Uno
When I realized where this quote in the movie came from, I thought: Of course, it is Michael who says this to his straight, commitment-phobic guy friend. Michael is also a gay artist in New York City in the 1990s, trying to build a better life for himself in advertising as he experiences the grief from the AIDS crisis and the homophobia of that time that holds him back from building a full life. Jonathan is making fun of his ad job and giving him shit for not choosing to make art instead. See this scene.
“To live in love” - I adore this phrase so much.
Phrase borrowed from Kate Mann
A phrase I heard at the “Ghalib Aur Kahaniyan” play directed by Anindya Kalra
The British Queen Elizabeth IInd said that.
As alwaysssss Uno - you are the beautiful articulation of my heart. You write with a silky flow, but I particularly think your writing shines most when you write about love. There's something there :)
When I read your thoughts on love and fear, I couldn't help but think about love and attachment. Buddhism, bell hooks, and generally other smart schoolsof thoughts all say similar things - which is that love and attachment can't co-exist. To love is to not be attached. And well, fear is a form of attachment too. I've tried a lot to identify what is love and what is attchment in my life. And a love without fear, without loss, without grief - is a very 'light' emotion to hold. Many of us will live our lives without knowing that feeling. I used to be driven by heavy deep intense love. Now I seek light love. I try.