I want to love you unconditionally, but I don’t. At least, not yet. Not as much as I want to.
There are pieces of you that feel effortless to meet. When I encounter those parts, love flows easily–peaceful, even joyful. These aren’t our growth moments or our conflict moments. These are our safe moments. And I’m grateful we have more of those now than ever before.
But there are other pieces of you that feel harder for me to meet. When they show up, I have to summon an immense amount of love–more than feels available in my daily capacity. It feels like extra is required, and I don’t always know where to source that excess from.
Logically, I understand these “difficult” pieces aren’t bad pieces. They’re simply the ones furthest away from my place of safety.
I wish I were a free flowing well of love–a person who could meet every version of you with the same openness and ease. But in the moments when I meet the hardest parts, I’m forced to face something uncomfortable: I am not full of limitless love. My love is not unconditional. It is very much conditional.
One of the places I struggle most is with your manic energy–the scattered, chaotic, fast-moving energy. I know this energy also fuels creativity, passion, possibility. It’s an energy I carry too. Somehow, when I’m the squirrel, it feels alive. When you’re the squirrel, it feels unsafe.
In those moments, I can’t see the duality. I can only see the negative polarity. And when that happens, I fall into a black hole. Inside that hole, anger wages war–against me, against my body, against you, against the world. It used to swallow me whole. I’d go blind inside it, tumbling endlessly. Now, sometimes, I’m more aware. Sometimes I am the observer and I can watch myself slipping and try to grab hold before I fall.
On rare occasions, I catch myself in time. I find enough patience to steady the moment. The black hole disappears, and I feel myself return to the ground–centered again, moving from a full cup of love that I can actually pour toward you.
But more often, I don’t notice the stumble until I’m already falling. I watch myself falling, search for something to cling to–breath, sensation, apology, a pause in the conversation, whispering to myself, “You have more patience, you have more patience.” I reach into every tool I know. Knowing that if I could only find love as an anchor point, I could find my salvation and stop falling.
But what if I don’t? What happens when none of these tools work?
It’s a helpless thing to watch yourself fall to what feels like an internal pit of failure.
Part of the fear isn’t just the present moment. It’s the weight of the past. I’ve watch your manic energy accelerate with drugs. I’ve watched it pull you inward, into projects, into spending, into singular decisions that feel like they belonged to you instead of us. Those memories aren’t imaginary. They happened.
And I also know I gave up too much of myself for the sake of your independence–so much that I stopped speaking up for what I needed. I built a one-sided freedom and quietly locked myself inside it, then taught myself how to resent the prison I never named.
Now I’m learning to unwind that part of me. But because of that history, I get scared when I feel echoes of separation. Caffeine. Unplanned journeys. A shift in energy. Fear takes the wheel. And fear, ironically, starts creating the very separation I’m most afraid of. I pull away first. I anticipate the distance before it exists. My body prepares for abandonment that may not even be coming.
Then I fall into a different black hole–the deeper one. Not the one that says I’m struggling to love unconditionally, but the one that whispers: You are incapable of unconditional love.
In that hole, awareness fades. Soon I’m no longer the observer watching myself fall–I am just the falling. And from there, I fight not with love, but with hostility. The very reaction that creates the isolation I feared. Only later, when I’m alone, separated, quiet again, does the hole dissolve. I return to myself. I can see what happened from the outside. And shame arrives.
The feeling of regret for how I’ve acted, how I’ve treated you. The judgment for my lapse in judgment. These feelings swell into tears that overwhelm me and simultaneously release the tension in my body–a tool I know that, if I could skip straight to it, the simple act of crying, I wouldn’t stay in that hole for so long.
In this recovery, I want to apologize, beg for forgiveness, lean in and hug you, be near you again. I don’t know why I have to fall into a black hole to reach this point. If I can’t stop myself from falling, sometimes I wish I could just teleport to the bottom of the hole, but that isn’t growth. That’s wisdom. That’s unconditional love. I can’t magically appear as that version of myself without the work.
So I’m working, and working, and working–trying not just to see myself slip, but to catch myself before I fall, or steady myself while I’m falling, or crawl back out after I hit the bottom. Each of these, no matter how messy they look, is part of how I’m learning to love unconditionally. Moment by moment.
And fortunately, I do find myself stumbling less, falling into more shallow holes, and reaching the bottom faster.
Thank you for being on this journey of learning with me.
I, too, feel like the kid in class who can’t quite get it. Why can’t I just understand already? But when I really look, I realize it’s only you and me in this classroom. I only want to be a good student so you’ll sit with me at lunch, giggle with me on the playground, hold hands with me while we walk home after school.
And the truth is: I already have that.
So why am I still so fixated on making sure you keep loving me and I keep loving you, when we prove every day that we do–simply by showing up to school, even after a black hole?
I know you ask yourself this same question in your own way, and fuck, I don’t have the answer either. Maybe someday we will.
