Love Is Like a Kubrick Film

What can I say about love that hasn’t already been said? The word has as many different meanings as there are hidden messages in a Kubrick film.

I don’t think I have much special insight into the state or nature of true love, but I’ve known many kinds of love, which makes me very lucky indeed.

The really weird thing about love is how it is simultaneously the most commonly shared feeling in the world and the one feeling we can never manage to describe accurately.

But we keep on trying to, don’t we?

A red, red rose. An ocean. A raging inferno. Little heart attacks that aren’t enough to kill you but are just enough to make you walk funny. A heat wave. The sun. Quicksand.

I’ve been working on loving myself better for a while. And by that, I mean treating myself with the same compassion and care I treat other people I love: my mom, my best friend, my boyfriend.

It’s a little bit like being forced to play nice with the kid who used to be your best friend until she started smoking cigarettes and shoplifting. Now when you see each other at the park, your moms make you sit together. But it’s awkward and awful because you’re still hurting from losing her, losing the closeness you once had. You want to reach out, but you can’t.

I want to be kind to myself, forgive myself, accept myself for who I am. And sometimes I do, at least for a sweet, shining moment.

But fear and guilt are powerful motherfuckers. And mine run deep, to a childhood shrouded in the sins of my father.

I’ve been writing a story for work lately about how we live what we see, how we tend to follow the examples around us of how to be a person in the world from a very young age. How the environment we grow up and the role models we have can imprint upon us a sense of being valuable, merely by being alive.

It can also convince us on a cellular level that we are worthless. And that imprint is tough to undo.

I’m undoing mine. Slowly but surely, I’m loosening my grip on the nugget of shame I’ve been nurturing in my chest. It’s smooth and slippery, difficult to get a bead on. Like a cold sore, it surfaces when I’m under a lot of stress. But it’s getting smaller, and the outbreaks are further apart. That must mean progress.

And like a Kubrick film, my progress is murky, funny in a dark way and kind of meandering but with a lot of cool, artistic moments. And likely full of hidden messages I won’t understand for years.

On top of this personal progress, I’m in a fairly new and very intense relationship. With a man. It feels like the right person at the right time. It feels like an ocean, a raging inferno, little heart attacks that aren’t enough to kill me but are just enough to make me walk funny. Sometimes it feels like quicksand.

For Valentine’s Day, we’ll cook dinner together, drink wine, share some chocolate. But first, I’ll do something loving and tender for myself. I will slip that nugget of shame into a little velvet sack and tuck it into a cedarwood box I have from when I was little and shared a room with my sister. It’ll be safe and warm there, I can visit it anytime I want, and I won’t have to carry it around for a while.