Hello November !

 “You’ll never be able to find yourself if you’re lost in someone else.” -  Colleen Hoover, November 9

You know you are dramatically hurting when you quoting lines from a romantic bestseller. Everything around love is romanticized and hence, commercialized.  Falling in love is all about pink, lavenders, hearts, rainbow, flowers … falling out of love (whether break-ups or one sided love stories) is about a tub of ice creams or binge watching on Romcoms -  Notting Hill, How to lose a guy in 10 days, One day, The Notebook or book reads from Danielle Steele or Cecilia Ahern or Nicholas Spark or now Colleen Hoover collection. Romanticism is ruining relationships with unrealistic expectations. We expect things like lifetime of happiness and happily ever after with finding that 'one true love'... the key to ending loneliness. So much pressure on the other person to provide everything.

To its exact opposite is the idea of self love - again an idea of romanticizing the concept of being alone and exaggerating the concept of being independent. A market for  buying things for yourself , spending on a spa, going solo on a vacation, dining alone on a weekend because you are a strong woman, who needs a companion!

In all of this you are not allowed to entirely feel the unadulterated joy, excitement, pain, loneliness. If someday you feel like asking a friend out for dinner you judge yourself for being dependent , not strong for being able to deal with being alone and maybe feeling lonely. We do not allow ourselves to go through the rollercoaster of emotions we may feel...we avoid confronting them.

We do not ask someone out because we are scared of rejection , we avoid deep conversations because we are scared of attachments, we do not express how someone's action hurt us because we are scared of abandonment , we do not celebrate happiness because we are scared that it may be short-lived. Just let yourself be, accept your emotions , go through it to know how it feels. It will make us vulnerable not volatile, it will make us empathetic not just sympathize and finally it will make us appreciate every emotion for what it does to us and who we become as a person. 

A bunch of flower today reminded me flowers bloom and make a room look beautiful even though they wither away eventually. I believe in the power of love and the power of collective , the power of good intentions , the power of giving yourself a chance.