Besides All the Love I Had, It Really Passes

Oil paiting by Italian artist Ilaria Ratti. Reproduced: @ratsandlilies / Twitter (X)

I am really starting to enjoy associating the Love Issue line with pop culture references. Just to be clear, no, it is not on purpose and it is not even the ideal. It just comes to me so naturally that I simply cannot ignore it.

But well, putting some thoughts and dreams out there, I really do love writing the Love Issue. To be honest, this is where I feel most confident to just talk and word vomit things that sometimes will not even make sense. But someway, somehow, I still believe in my bones that you can understand me, because we are united here by more than just these words — we share a feeling of intimacy through our thoughts.

So I was rewatching Fleabag for the 'I do not even know how many times' time, and of course I got caught by the famous 'It'll pass' line. As I said before, I feel very comfortable doing some self-exposure here while editing this line, and with that I wanted it said for real. I was in love some time ago and used to spend my entire days thinking about someone so complex — like every other human being — that it shook me to the core. Even my closest friends were worried about how much effort I was putting into every single thought about the possibilities of what could happen between us. Complicated? Maybe.

Turns out that coming home Wednesday night while in an Uber, this fucking line that had me a few days ago poisoned my brain and heart out of nowhere all over again, and I found myself in a complete vortex of feelings, thoughts and confused life plans. 'What the hell do you mean by confused life plans?' you might ask, and being completely honest — and maybe wrong — that is simply how it happens to me.

I have spent my entire life trying to find myself in... myself. Since I can remember as a kid, I wanted to conquer the world and do every little specific thing existing in the world like acting, being a CEO, a singer, an architect, a designer, a teacher, a doctor — actually not this one — and everything else you could ever imagine. It happens that this comes with a cost. Sometimes it evolves into so much more than just wanting and fighting for it that you constantly find yourself getting mad at yourself, and with me it was no different. Comparison, self-love, altruism, belief in yourself and all those common sense words that are supposed to empower you became a problem for me. Not because of their meaning, but definitely because I could not find myself in them.

Accepting this amount of emotion about myself is still a process in my mind. I constantly need to organize my thoughts to get somewhere in my head, to set emotional goals to align with my 'real life' goals like my career, making money, success, getting good grades at college, having a good perception from people, projecting a nice image of myself to the world, and even this project that I can now safely call my personal passion. The problem is that every time I fell in love with someone, it messed all of that up.

Maybe it is not normal, maybe I am just being too dramatic, but this kind of earthquake in my own structure is really hurtful in an embarrassing way. It is not like I cannot divide what I am doing from what I am feeling, but naturally things start to merge inside here, and how am I supposed to not write a song about you? To not set aside time in my day to think and imagine a life with you? And even though I consider myself a very professional person who can specifically do this work with a broken heart, it is really hard to not write a crônica about you.

'You' is not a specific person or directed at anyone in particular. It actually represents all these past lovers that made me more creative, mentally prepared me for emotional earthquakes and inspired me to be me after all. I would not dare say that I ever felt truly loved. I do not know what to consider as that because I simply do not know. It is hard, it is confusing and sometimes it even hurts me a lot. There was this specific situation where I would fall in love with someone and this person would always be nice and gentle to me but not exactly love me back. Or the one situation where I would be so in love that I would start being selfish, not seeing that I was doing something bad just by being by someone's side. I could even imagine myself living on good terms with an ex, doing joint custody of our kids like in a romantic comedy. The thing is that none of these stories that existed in my mind were even close to being true, but the anxiety of love and the idea of having your life changed by someone who can give, be and define your world is truly — and naturally — terrifying.

Not all love stories have bad endings, but most of the ones I am telling you about never even started at all, and this also scares me to the heart because I still see every one of them in my life. I think I have never said this before, but I do like songwriting just as much as I like writing poems and crônicas. I also use creative work to distract my mind from the love failures I collect. I am fueled by who I am, because I believe I am also who I love. I cannot feel anything other than gratitude for those who let me love them. This space right here exists because some of these lovers — whether they loved me back or not — taught me a lot about who I am and who I was fighting to be, and I think that is why the Fleabag Priest's line catches me off guard every time I remember it.

I love you, but it will pass, and when it is done, everything that survives is going to be what I became while loving you.