If You Really Loved it
Image by @carlheyerdahl on Unsplash
If you really loved the thing, you would do it every day.
If you really loved it, you would do the thing for free.
Forget capitalism or a brain saturated with grocery lists and doctor’s appointments and the watch on your wrist that keeps telling you to stand the eff up once in a while. If you really loved it, you would do it constantly.
You have the same hours in a day as Beyonce, albeit you do not have an assistant or a chef or someone to answer your phone calls and emails or another someone to clean your house and set out your outfit for the day and do your hair and consult you on an adult skincare routine that includes more than “warm water” and “hopes and prayers.”
If it’s truly your passion, you will not stop until you’ve made it your full time thing.
Only when you work on this thing you love relentlessly until your hair falls a little bit out every day will you somehow also never work a day in your life.
Because of how in love you are, how hard you worked, how dedicated you are at the expense of the basic things in your life (your relationships, your preventative care appointments, dry cleaning that dress you wore to your friends wedding six weeks ago, the houseplants you purchased to purify the air and help your brain and lungs work better while also providing a delicate IKEA ambiance), you will finally prove to your (evidently balding) self that you are a winner.
You fed the algorithm until it patted its belly and waved you off, unable to eat another bite of your delicious content croquettes.
You proved to those skinny bitches with the (indoor?) felt hats whose brims do not flex that you are serious about your life and the thing you love so much that you never missed a day of sitting down at your laptop to write, even when you didn’t want to and even when your brain was tired and could give you nothing and was begging for rest and even when it really didn’t matter.
So, congratulations. Now you a little bit hate the thing you love, and yourself, and the bitches with the hats.
Now, because of how impossible it all feels and kind of is, you want to never do the thing you love again and instead braid hair for a living even though you do not know how to braid.
Maybe you defined loving all wrong and confused it with someone else’s idea of loving, of success, of dedication.
Maybe you didn’t have to take the test in the first place, because they are not your teachers and you never signed up for this class in the first place.
Get up.
Grab your bag.
Walk out.
Maybe you got confused about what love feels like and what love is “supposed” to be like or feel like or do for you and you for it.
You hadn’t even considered that maybe you could love something deeply without having to prove it by checking all the boxes on someone else’s list.
So, stop it.
Sit down in your vocabulary closet and throw out all the things that do not bring you joy. Things like the horrendous “Monetization” blouse and the matching “You Are Your Business” pants. They look hideous on you and you know that. It’s not you, it’s that the blouse is a sheer cheetah print and the pants are Tiffany blue starched capris with cherries on them. They. Are. Gross.
Now bag them up, and donate them. Someone else may love cheetah and cherries, but you are not them and they are not you.
When you’re done, take all the shit off your phone and your bookshelves that are confusing the love. The apps, the podcasts, the business books.
You are not a business.
You are art.
Your art is sucking because you are smushing it into a box and crawling inside to cram yourself in along with it. You have a cramp in your leg from the contorting and you are quite frankly, pissed about it.
So, stop it.
Break out your notebook with the soft green cover and your favorite gel pens and make the love feel like love again.
You love it.
You don’t need to prove it.
So, stop it.
Lovingly Yours,
Emily Rose // Miss Magnolia
Tap into your creative brain and log some self care at the same time with the downloadable Self Care Activity Pack and get your word search on, color in front of your favorite TV show, and write a letter to your past and future self (oooh, spooky!)
