This year I feel no need to disparage myself in the name of Valentine's day. This year, I am trying, with all my might, to no longer be disenchanted by love. A goal and gradual understanding that took a good bit of heartache, and a lot of time by myself. Six months ago, I was told by someone that they couldn't be with me because they weren't obsessed with me and this made me pretty sad. I watched the Muppet Movie and sobbed a hearty, rejected sob I had only ever dreamed of in masochistic adolescent fantasies. This moment, in hindsight, was a signifier for the following six months, and in full transparency, what I know will be much longer. Whether I liked it or not, I had to be told one way or another that someone was not obsessed with me. This statement was the antithesis of the love I had taught myself to practice in two years of infatuation and twenty of aimlessly, wistfully pining and it crushed me. When I was younger, I cried over boys I did not know, I'd make up names for the Cute Guy I saw on the bus, mythologize a connection that had brewed out of a need to be seen and feel a love I could not understand or access. I'd cry over friends who couldn't sleepover the following weekend out of an illusion of hatred they had for me and grasp on to them in search of endless assurance. In these moments, within this thinking and budding resentment I would build towards those who loved me and who I loved in return, I thought myself unwantable. Alas, when I was seveteen I "finally" found love and did not need to hopelessly lean on the friends who had built me up as tall as they possibly could have. Things had changed, and though naive, I had found something that was undeniably pretty special. But, like most do, our teenaged love came to an end and I returned to grasping--this time with my fingers talonesque and ten feet long. I reached out and eventually lashed out, pushing those around me and harming those whose care I deemed insufficient. But still, I believe I was loved. I believe that I was loved and know I was confused and thus, cruel and eventually a little bit alone. But as I write these words and I hear the way I try to impart some of my wisdom on those around me, I realize I still am confused, still a little bit alone, still loved. But, I am trying, with every book I read and walk I take and song I feel in my fingers, to be less cruel. While all of these things; art, solitude, half empty streets, have acted as guidance, I have no one to thank but the people who have loved me and have led me to find that I am not deserving of, nor do I desire obsession. The people who have shown me kindness, and patience, and have taken the strength and time to tell me the things that inspire endless sentimental etchings like these are those I have to thank. And because of this, the unfathomable, mythologized love I yearned for, revealed itself as nonexistent. Love, I am beginning to see, is not unfathomable; it is something you can see and touch and feel and know, and that, albeit generally much less grandeur than what I had yearned for as a teenager, it is fucking. awesome!!! So, this year, and hopefully for those to follow, I will reject obsession and I will love through the joy I find from myself and reflect as much of that as I can in my family, my friends, and those who I love otherwise. I am not a writer and this post is corny but I am 20 and it is truthful to me right now and writers are assholes and perhaps all truths at twenty are a little corny . Here is a list of songs I found fitting today as I laid down a lot and shuffled through my liked songs and various playlists: Valentine's.