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

by Mimi Zhu

I do not believe in feelings (or anything) traveling in straight lines. Instead, I see spirals, circles, eruptions, spikes, and waves of emotion. I believe that feeling is a perpetual moving cycle, where we meet ourselves repeatedly with compassion and new insight.

There is a reason why numbness comes to visit us after we are hurt. Perhaps numbness does not signify a “lack” of feeling, just as deserts do not lack for life. Numbness is a compelling stage of wisdom on its own, and it offers an expansiveness that prepares us for the abundance of our feelings. Numbness does not have to be a blockage, especially if we honor its impermanence by not attempting to shorten or prolong it.

Numbness is a time of preparation for abundance. While it is important to recognize our numbness as a crucial stage of healing, it is also important to remember that we do not have to do it alone. Numbness is found within the sap of the earth and the blood that runs through our veins. It is protective in spirit and guides us toward the continued work of true healing. We must learn to discern between natural and manufactured numbness, and honor natural numbness as a call for tenderness with one another and ourselves.

It can be an act of love to confront somebody when we feel betrayed by them if we are transparent and centered in our intention to express ourselves, and not focused on punishing the other person or replicating harm.

We must allow the anger to be in our experience. I continued on and spoke about letting ourselves be angry as the first step to healing the hurt that is beneath the anger. I talked about my anger and how learning from my anger about all the hurt inside me that the anger was covering. And that if we don’t wrestle with anger, we never get to the heartbreak. And if we don’t get to the heartbreak, we don’t get to the healing.

Ocean Vuong wrote, “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.”[*] If we befriend only what feels good, we alienate our hurt. When we are judged by others and ourselves for weeping about separation, heartbreak, trauma, tragedies, accidents, and death, we push vital parts of ourselves away. The binaries of good and evil categorize our difficult feelings as evil and our happy feelings as good. When sorrow is seen with self-judgment, it can generate a great sense of fragmentation within. Suppressing our sadness can grow into a cruel cynicism, making us scared of our own feelings and doubtful of the fullness of life.

But grief is messy, and survival is complex, and I was not on my own healing journey; I was on a journey that was sold to me. I felt pressured to conform to a speedy and clean recovery that required no true vulnerability, grief, or ugliness. I did not allow myself tears or solitude, and soon I began to control and dismiss myself in the very same ways that he did. Because he was no longer around to police my feelings and actions, I sat in as a substitute and policed myself. I did not realize that the tears I needed to cry were not for him. They were for me.

Initially I was resistant to it, telling myself that I could care less to learn about the sources of patriarchal violence; all I knew was that it needed to stop. However, I later realized that by extending that compassion toward men I was inadvertently extending compassion toward myself, because it provided me with hope that there was possibility for change. As much as I try to deny it, I will always have an attachment to men, whether through family, work, friendship, or romance. I have brothers, a father, paternal figures, and friends whom I deeply care for and wish to hold accountable. We must exist among men, and spending our days living in fear is not ideal for our survival.

Mia Mingus asks: What if we rushed towards our own accountability and understood it as a gift we can give to ourselves and those hurting from our harm? What if we understood our accountability, not as some small insignificant act, but as an intentional drop in an ever-growing river of healing, care, and repair that had the potential to nourish, comfort and build back trust on a large scale, carving new paths of hope and faith through mountains of fear and unacknowledged pain for generations?

I am not broken, even though my heart has been. I am not beyond repair, because I am constantly regenerating. I do not wish to cause harm, though sometimes I may do so unintentionally. If I do cause harm, my ghosts generously remind me of the importance of my relationships, and I am encouraged to be courageous in my accountability. My ghosts tell me that I cannot travel back in time or undo the damage that has been done, and that my commitment to being loving needs to be rooted in the now.

At the core of all my heartbreaks reverberates a loud resounding truth: I have been so committed to finding my presence in other relationships that I had forgotten to nurture my relationship with myself. I know now that the generosity of heartbreak serves as an invitation to get to know exactly how lovable we are for ourselves.

some of us would take it personally, as if we had failed one another and ourselves. We would punish one another, call one another names, and reenact the same harm that we had experienced in past relationships. Expecting utopia didn’t take into consideration how complicated and layered each of us was, and how, as queer people of color, we have all endured and survived traumatic experiences.

At our most joyful, we experience moments of synthesis. At our messiest, we are given raw opportunities to learn and unlearn many complexities, and to guide one another and ourselves in an intertwining process. Through meaningful relationships we are forced to be honest with ourselves and one another, and that is an act of love. We are taught how to set boundaries, hold ourselves accountable, heal interdependently, and communicate effectively in myriad ways. Being human is ever complex and being queer means to be in perpetual metamorphosis. In communion, we hold one another through fear and emerge from it in rapturous song and dance.

My friends allowed me to be vulnerable in their arms, wiping my tears and assuring me that they would love me even as my unpredictable and messy emotions came to the surface. They did not wish to control me, nor were they threatened by the honest displays of my emotion. As they massaged my hands and my feet, I learned that loving communion is finding new ways of sharing safety and ensuring mutual liberation. Finding people who honor your full multidimensional self is not easy, but when you do, you have begun relearning love, and you have found chosen family.

Reciprocity is a perpetual exchanging of gifts that allows us to see the abundance that should be available to us all. Our networks are as intricate as the communities that grow in the earth, and as we explore our interconnections, we need to nourish our soil. We cannot be a sibling without a family, we cannot be a seed without a garden, we cannot be in communion without community, and we cannot be human without Earth. We cannot know of love without one another, so let us learn together.

Communion is a sacred form of presence, and it is only threatening to those who cannot admit to themselves that they yearn for it. In togetherness, I abandon the ideas of an isolated individual self, and am reminded that my love is connected to all love. As I dance, you dance. As I sing, you sing, and my blossoming is your blossoming.

The word “miracle” is technically defined as a noun, but what if we thought of a miracle as an action? In the same way that bell hooks describes love as a verb, what if we believed that we are engaging in miracle as a movement, and that we are constantly miracle-ing with every sacred breath?

The path has been treacherous, and it has also been full of love. Both of those truths merge into a bittersweet combination. When I learned to be in loving relationship with myself, I had to open my heart to the possibilities of falling in love again. I had to fall in love with the world around and within me.

In All about Love, bell hooks writes about what practicing true love requires of us. To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. We are often taught we have no control over our “feelings.” Yet most of us accept that we choose our actions, that intention and will inform what we do. We also accept that our actions have consequences. She concludes the paragraph by explaining the six ingredients of love: When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.

Sometimes our relationships are so difficult that separating can be an act of love. Love as a feeling is simply not enough.

Because we are getting to know ourselves as sources of love, we might become very good at providing love, while forgetting how it feels to receive. My therapist once told me that receiving love is just as important as giving it, and that I needed to honor my role as both provider and recipient. I need to engage in a reciprocal exchange of love where I no longer erase myself from the equation. It was profound when I used bell hooks’s six ingredients of love as a guideline to ask myself: Do I show care and respect toward myself? Do I trust myself, and do I commit to treating myself with kindness and affection?

Self-love is not about building yourself up to become a perfect, “lovable” person, but realizing that you are worthy of love simply because you are here.

While white spiritual practitioners and corporations might find it easy to ask somebody to love themselves, it is imperative that they start by considering who exactly has the privilege of growing up encouraged to love themselves in the first place.

Contrary to what I believed, the love that I poured into myself did not deplete a finite supply of love. The more I poured into myself, the more it multiplied in abundance. I took myself on romantic dates, gave myself permission to go to therapy, asked my loved ones for reciprocal care, communicated openly and honestly, admitted hard truths, read books in the sun, and shared unconditional love with Earth. Being gentle with myself, reparenting myself, and romancing myself strengthened all my relationships.