I don’t know what it is, but everything I read or watch lately seem to have immense amounts of yearning between characters. Maybe the yearning has always been there, and much more likely is that I am a deeply romantic person at heart and I always choose love if it’s an option between folks. Yearn freely and openly, but maybe also talk about your feelings sometimes?

I’m mostly thinking about Will and Mike from Stranger Things as I’m watching Season 4. Talk about your feelings bro. You’re obviously in love!!! Anyway.

Vogue ran an article about a month ago asking if it was embarrassing to have a boyfriend and to their point, I probably would have said yes before I met my current boyfriend. But the difference for me between then and now is that A) I was trying too hard to BE a girlfriend, and B) I didn’t embrace my cringe.

Let’s dive deeper into these points.

For a long time, all I wanted was a relationship. I would force myself into situations that were uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe just in case it could lead to something more. I thought that having a relationship would be the end to my loneliness and having a built in friend would solve my problems of what to do on the weekends. You could say I wasn’t in it for the right reasons. (A lesson I’ve had to learn about a lot of other things in life as well. Read: all the newsletters I started thinking I was going to be famous and was mad when I never got more than 50 subscribers.)

But now? I don’t know. Life is finite and I turned 30 and stopped caring what I thought I was supposed to do as much. I think that leads me nicely in to point B - it’s okay to feel feelings and be loud about it. I love Twilight and Shrek and I’m really not afraid to show it.

There’s a quote in Emma by Jane Austen that goes “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.” I think that’s untrue, at least for me. Because if you think about it, why waste all that time yearning when you could have something great? (Sometimes I don’t know if I’m making sense because half the time as I’m writing these newsletters, I only very lightly edit, and then don’t think twice about publishing them.) If feeling your feelings and talking about them makes you cringe, so be it. Ever since I put out a YouTube video when I was 13 of me wearing a box on my head (a story for another time), I realized I was cringe for the long haul.

If you take one thing from this ramble, I hope that it is yearn freely, be yourself, and I don’t know, take a chance on that cutie.

<3 Martha