Love is a choice.

It is 6:33 pm and I am anxious, to such an extent that I cannot do anything else but focus on calming my nervous system. So here I am writing.

This anxiety is caused by a rupture in a relationship that means a lot to me. The rupture was caused on my part due to two things. My neurodivergence and CPTSD symptoms. Mis-perceiving boundaries resulted in me crossing them unknowingly and a choice I made in intense emotions that caused pain to the other. I cut them off randomly, blocked them from my life completely, ending a friendship when mistrust plagued my mind. Only to realize later that I was acting not by choice but from an old and loyal trauma response.

I have spent the last 9 years of my life trying to heal and be ‘less broken’. To not cause such hurt to others involuntarily and be in fulfilling relationships. When in the trauma response, the certainty of what I perceive as a threat is so insidious. Even with the most sophisticated skills of nervous system regulation, I still get duped by it. I am coming to accept that these contractions of my nervous system are a permanent feature of Kâli.

This is painful because relationships are hard as it is. And the fact is that so far those that I have entrusted with my heart have run out of patience and compassion with my body-mind. This anxiety, therefore, is fear. Fear that again, I have caused loss and grief to myself and pain to the other. Fear of being rejected, being too hard to love.

As someone who gets such delight from relationships, a hopeless romantic and loyal-to-death type of person, hopelessness, and despair lurk in the darkness of my heart as often as these contractions show up in my nervous system. They are here right now.

I have tried to alchemize this pain, despair, and hopelessness into a quest somewhat successfully, or at least that is what I like to believe. A quest to understand what love really is. What true love is. To understand it enough to give it. Give it enough to recognize when I receive it.

As I sit here today I cannot help but say - love is a choice. Yes, soulmates, twin flames, and love at first sight, synchronous fairytales are possible. But in God’s dream called Kâli, love is a choice. Love is a choice even when it hurts, both ways.

That drive for being less broken is shifting into a desire to just give love. With so many reminders in my body-mind that sapiens are unsafe, and this world dangerous, it would be understandable for me to shrink my heart. But I choose love, because the divine is my teacher of love. I trust the way God & Goddess love me. They show up loudly both when I feel invincible and when I feel broken.

I am therefore trying to bootstrap my faith in the divine and extend that to this friend AND myself as soon as I am waking up from the trance of trauma. I refuse to be jaded and resentful. I refuse to give up on myself and this relationship. I CHOOSE LOVE.

And in the great dramatic dark comedy that is my love life - choosing love is requiring a shedding of all other criteria. My laundry list of wants, attributes, etc. He is not someone I expect to save me. I am thriving as my own savior bitch! Finding oddly creative and pleasurable ways to stay in the darkness long enough to make it through it.

True love simply put is becoming a singular criterion. It is that which chooses to stay through ruptures to find the love waiting on the other side. Chooses to stay even when we hurt each other unknowingly. This replaces my drive to fix myself with a delicious turn-on in finding the most playful and pleasurable ways to move from rupture to repair to regeneration first alone and then flirtatiously together. I trust this friend will see it this way too. And if they don’t. I will grieve the loss and be okay too.

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Update: it’s 8:58pm. Since I started writing this - I stopped to sob hard, meditated imperfectly, and went back on forth on whether I should share this with the friend. And then as the insights kept ripening, the following song brought me back to gratitude for this anxiety, this pain, this day. Thank you for your wisdom Jermaine Edwards, - and Rushawn & Kiffness for this wonderful rendition.

co-regulating with the goddess in the form of rain that came down hard just when I needed it. The goddess chooses to love me regardless if I choose her or not. Like gravity, solid. Like rain, soothing gentle touch on shivering nerves.

The word ISHQ is what I wrote on myself. ISHQ is a Persian word for devotion toward the divine. ISHQ has been my most loyal co-regulator. My teacher. My true love. Both in the unmanifested God as father and the Motherly mesmerizing play of life called earth and evolution.