Love Hard

Love Hard

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it actually means to love hard. I’ve always known I have deep feelings and emotions, but I don’t think I understood until recently just how many different parts of my life that shows up in. I’m not talking about just romantic love either. I’m talking about my family, my son, my dog, my clients, complete strangers, my body and finally myself. Love isn’t just something you say or something you feel. Love is an action. It’s a choice we make, and I choose to love hard.

An 11-year friendship that accidentally turned into blind love probably taught me more about that than anything. I learned that I forgive often and I watch patterns for growth. I see when people are wearing a mask, and I can usually see the hurt hiding underneath it. Hurt people hurt people, and I don’t automatically hold that against somebody. I call it out gently and then I deal with what comes next. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to shitty behavior. Quite the opposite. 😂 I pay attention. I just don’t think you have to hate somebody because they hurt you. You can understand somebody and still change how you deal with them. You can forgive somebody and still remember the pattern. You can love somebody and decide that love needs to look different now. Sometimes love is right beside somebody and sometimes it’s from a distance. It’s still love.

Somewhere in those 11 years I also learned that if I was going to love everybody else that hard, I needed to learn how to love myself the same way. My body is probably one of the best examples. This poor thing and I have been through hell together and have had to rebuild and repair many times, but I never gave up on it just because it was hard. I show up to my Life Time classes, I push through, I work on stability and strength and I keep finding muscles I didn’t even know were possible. Now I’m back to a size 3/26, around 130 pounds and getting stronger. That didn’t happen because I hated my body into changing. I started paying attention to it and caring about what it needed. Apparently now it needs me to pay attention to menopause being in full swing too. 😂 Love yourself hard enough to notice when something shifts and actually do something about it. Also, hot flashes are no joke. I don’t know what asshole came up with those, but seriously, what the fuck? 🔥😂

Then I look around at the people in my life and realize I’ve been doing this forever. My little brother is getting ready to spread his wings and move out of state on his own. I’ve loved him through a lot of unknown and carried him when he needed me to, but watching him get to the point where he can do this himself is pretty cool. I didn’t carry him so he would need me forever. I carried him until he could find his own footing.

Then there’s my son, and that is where Momma Lion comes out. He has autism, and when he couldn’t fight for himself, I fought for him. I held strong against people who tried to hold him back or mistreat him because I knew what was inside that kid even when other people couldn’t see it. Today he’s 21, in college and working. He had to do the work to get there, but there were years when I had to make damn sure nobody else got to decide what his future was going to look like before he had the chance to build it himself.

My mom is another kind of complicated love. There are CPTSD mommy issues there, and there were plenty of reasons I could have iced her out forever. Instead, at some point I decided to try looking through her eyes. I gave her experiences that opened her eyes and helped her understand things she hadn’t understood before. Somehow I ended up teaching my own mom how to love me back. That doesn’t magically erase anything that happened, but I didn’t need it to. I needed something to change, and it did. That’s probably why I don’t automatically write people off when they fuck up. I watch what they do afterward. There’s a big difference between somebody who is hurting and willing to grow and somebody who just keeps handing you the same shit in a different box.

And then there’s Parker, who makes all of this look ridiculously simple. 😂 That dog is constantly up in my business. He lays next to me, follows me around and apparently believes personal space is something that happens to other families. I can look at him and say, “Parker, do you love Momma?” and he immediately gets all excited, tail wagging, trying to kiss me and jump all over me. There’s no question about what that dog feels because he shows it every damn day. Honestly, maybe humans have made this shit way more complicated than it needs to be. Parker’s over here like, “I love you, therefore I shall sit directly on top of you.” 😂

Even strangers have been making me think about this lately. There’s a woman at my Wednesday morning Caribou who recognizes me now from my order and my tattoos. She’s always kind, and she’ll point out something new she notices about me. It’s such a little thing, but it isn’t really little when you think about it. She pays attention. She sees another human being standing in front of her instead of just the next person in line waiting for coffee. We don’t know each other’s stories, and we probably never will, but for those few minutes she makes me feel seen. I think sometimes we forget that love can be that simple too. You can give a tiny piece of it to a complete stranger just by actually noticing they exist.

My clients get another version of me loving hard, especially my special-needs clients. I literally get in my car and drive to their homes because sometimes meeting people where they are is what they need. I care about them as people, which also means I occasionally deal with shit I probably shouldn’t because apparently loving hard and boundaries like to fight in the parking lot sometimes. 😂 I’m still working on that one. But there’s something else weird happening with one particular client lately, because of course there is. Every time I see this client, something that’s glass in my office shatters. At this point I’m like, hmm, okay spirit, I hear you. Clearly the glass is shattering and yet I can still love hard.

And maybe that glass is exactly where I am right now. Things can shatter without turning me into somebody I’m not. I don’t have to stop loving somebody just because I need distance. I don’t have to stop caring because something changed. I also don’t have to stand there getting cut by broken glass just to prove that my love was real. I can see what happened, deal with what comes next and keep moving. Love just looks differently sometimes, and sometimes it’s from a distance.

I think the biggest change is that I finally put myself on the list of people I love this way. I spent a lot of years fighting for other people, carrying people, forgiving people, understanding people, seeing through their masks and giving them room to grow. I don’t regret being that person. I actually like that part of me. I don’t want life to beat that out of me just because sometimes loving people hurts. What changed is that now I pay attention to my own patterns too. I notice when my body is asking for something. I notice when something doesn’t feel right. I notice when I’m the one who needs protecting, rebuilding, grace or a little distance.

So maybe loving hard was never the problem. Maybe I just needed to learn that loving myself belongs in there too. I can forgive and still pay attention. I can understand somebody and still say no. I can help somebody until they’re ready to spread their wings without trying to keep them beside me. I can fight like hell for somebody who needs my voice and then step back when they find their own. I can let a stranger make my morning because she remembered my tattoos. I can let Parker practically knock me over because I made the mistake of asking whether he loves Momma when we both already know the damn answer. 😂 I can even stand there looking at another piece of shattered glass and go, okay spirit, message received.

I don’t want to love less. I just want to keep getting better at how I love, including how I love me. The glass can shatter. Relationships can change. People can grow in different directions. My body can change and rebuild for the hundredth time. None of that requires me to become cold.

Love is an action. It’s a choice that we make. I choose to love hard. ❤️‍🔥