Over the Top

by Jonathan Van Ness

If you knew all of me, you wouldn’t love me anymore. You would no longer want me as your new best friend.

Joy can live beside sorrow. Life is messy, unpredictable, and seldom tied into neat little boxes.

It took a lot of trauma and tears to become the person you see today.

“If you knew all there was to know about me, you wouldn’t love me anymore,”

Joy and pain often occur all together. No matter our orientation, to live is to experience suffering at some point.

But living in a world where it’s so easy to take everyone’s highly curated Instagram feed at face value, it’s important to dig deeper, to read between the lines, to see through all of it and not compare yourself to them!

People mostly know me for being positive and loving. But part of being fearlessly, endlessly encouraging is also giving voice to the parts you don’t want seen

You can’t be fiercely loving without also being passionate—and sometimes passionate isn’t pretty. What might seem testy is actually scar tissue, the residual effects of trauma that I lived through.

So that’s the question that I keep coming back to. Would you love me if you saw me in a bad moment? Would you love me if I’m momentarily Grumps McGee about everybody taking forever? Would you love me if you saw all my parts?

My personality is a minivan, actually a small bus. There are different pieces of me that are all driving together, with one in charge based on what’s happening in my life.

Ideally, you get the parts to realize that they’re all in the same car—and they’re all trying to help, but your centered self is actually capable of driving you back to a safe, soothing place.

Did it begin as a near bus crash? Certainly. But it ended as a glamorous content session, crisis averted, content created, both of our days made.

Being able to entertain yourself is a valuable skill, especially if you’re in a prolonged dark space.

I’m pretty sure that “I hate uncertainty” was my first full sentence as a baby. So falling backward into something I couldn’t see—that was the scariest thing of all.

He believed that other people’s opinions are not a reflection of you, as long as your spirit is thriving.

All I had to lose was the moment, and a moment is something that we should never let go to waste.