Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection

by Mimi Zhu

I hope to share these moments with you, in hopes that my love finds yours.

Survivors have different and nuanced needs for healing and grieving.

in understanding accountability without self-punishment or flagellation, and in devoting the same kind of compassion I had granted my abuser to myself.

We will encounter all types of relationships: our relationships with one another, Earth, the systems that govern us, and ourselves. We are always in relationship, and we are always meeting again.

Numbness is an initiation that invites all our emotions to travel at their own sacred time. Just like the blessed desert, numbness is a force that invites us to acknowledge the eternity that stretches before us.

I thought that my numbness was an incapacity for feeling, a carelessness, and a reflection of a shallow form of love. I learned from the desert that my numbness did not illuminate how much or how little I cared, nor how deeply or shallowly I loved. It was not the extent of my grief, but it offered me a tender and spacious beginning. Numbness prompted me to tend to the life in my desert and prepare myself for feeling. The rain was quickly approaching.

in my refusal to become a victim, I neglected the tenderness of being a survivor.

My feelings were not my enemy, and they were not what I needed protection from.

Herbal medicine allows our cuts and wounds to remain while they aid in the regeneration of our physical vessels.

capitalism takes advantage of our natural desire to soothe our wounds. Capitalism seeks to replicate numbness not to heal, but to ensure that we

By overwhelming us with a dizzying fuzz of content, the worlds inside our phones are in constant movement. When we look away, we are unable to sit still.

Mutual aid is antithetical to the pharmaceutical industrial complex because it intends to abolish hierarchy and profit to create new possibilities of healing together.

At the core of a love-based anger, we are fighting for our sacred survival. Love encourages us not only to protect ourselves but also to honor our being and all that we are in relationship with.

Everything brings us back to love.

I like to imagine every emotion as a vital sacred protector, an ancestor embodied as a feeling, telling me in their own language what I have been taught to overlook. They all have homes within us. Anger is the sacred breath that we must allow ourselves to release, for it holds a vital truth about what truly matters most to us.

One of the most manipulative things an abuser can say is that they hurt you because they loved you. It is quite the opposite; they hurt you because they hate themselves.

When anger is used as an action toward liberation, the intent is not just to destroy but to nourish the fertile soil that is left in its wake, blossoming into new loving ways of thinking, feeling, and being.

This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.”

Violence is reflected within the fragmented soul of the person who perpetrates it.

represented the closest semblance of love and hate in his eyes, so much so that it confused and triggered him, and so he chose to replicate his wounds within me. He tore himself apart in the process, further deepening the wounds in himself.

Anxiety expects the worst and hopes for the best, but it never seems to be able to focus on the now.

Anxiety challenges our relationship with control.

Though I could not unbreak my heart, I slowly learned how to soothe it.

I cannot control my anxieties, though I can be aligned with my awareness. I am as enduring as the ocean and my anxiety mimics its movements: coming, going, and washing away.

inundated

aliveness that made me want to die.

I was fixated on his future because I did not want to process my past.

The foundation of relationships is meant to be safe: a celebration of the sanctity of each other’s being, and a commitment to protecting each

other from the violent forces of the world. You share experiences that illuminate the purity of presence, and memories that hold magic. A safe and stable foundation does not mean perfection, nor is it free of mistakes, misunderstanding, and hurt, but there needs to be a baseline and a mutual understanding that you will not violate each other, even when your feelings start to change.

These narratives seem to be fearful of shedding light on the nuanced aftermath of abuse because it is neither marketable nor “tragic” enough.

Nobody is afforded the luxury of consistent knowing. Our knowing shifts in every moment that we are present, which is why we so often latch on to what is familiar.

[Love is] ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. . . . Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.’ ”[*] I

the fearful-avoidant style,

I discovered the fearful-avoidant attachment style, which was not mentioned in Attached. According to Fern, people with this attachment style “have the characteristics of both the dismissive and preoccupied styles—their desire for closeness and their longing for connection are active, but because they have previous experiences of the ones they loved or depended on hurting them, they tend to feel uncomfortable relying on others or are even paralyzed by the fear that speaking their feelings and needs could be dangerous and make things worse.”

We also need to work on nurturing secure relationships with ourselves.

Our craving for stability reflects the dissatisfaction of our current constructed realities.

I refuse to believe that we are doomed because our collective anxiety shows that we care.

Our anatomy forms intricate constellations within us,

Joy never ceases to be beautiful, while grief never seems to get easier.

Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”

I lived in active resistance to him, which still made him the central figure in my life.

Because he was no longer around to police my feelings and actions, I sat in as a substitute and policed myself.

I ignored my intuition and succumbed to my longing,

feeling “secure” within our insecurity.

Much of the advice we have been taught to give and receive reduces the depths of grief to shallow waters.

Despite their good intentions, these responses normalize a careless dismissal of the profoundness of

our feelings, even when we are mourning the inevitability of ...

tears actively help guide the souls of our loved ones toward peaceful passing.

mourning aloud ushers the souls of our loved ones to return to the “Beach of Stars.”

grief challenges the fast pace of hyper-individualism.