what love is
Feb. 21st, 2019 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bookhobbit I've just finished the Raven Cycle and I'm going to review it, but not tonight. I made progress on my QP and I'll probably talk about it, but not tonight. Tonight I want to talk about feelings.
I'm accidentally acquiring a bit of a specialty in British English. Only, however, Northern and Welsh English. I am doing, this, really, because of Keel.
This makes it sound like a lot less desirable than it actually is. I'm glad of it: it's interesting. I am easily interested in things, so anything that gives me research directions is good.
I am also making it sound less deliberate than it is. It's deliberate, in a way. This is how I show I love someone. By learning about the things and places and people they grew up being in and loving. In hopes that this will make me understand.
I am learning about Wales, and about the North of England, in a way that feels a little like converting to a new religion in order to marry a member of it. I am learning about it because for as long as I have known Keel, those two places have been of central importance to him and his identity. And so I am folding them into my academic work, because they are interesting and worth studying, but also because they are part of his heart, and I want to understand his heart.
I... understand the importance of place, because I left home some eight years ago and have been missing a small piece ever since. And so, I know how much of your Self can come and go depending on where you are. And I want to be able to walk with understanding in the places where his Self is whole.
This feels to me like a very deep and basic kind of love that I have always wanted to offer the people I care most about. I want to understand their places, and to understand their languages, as best I can.
Most of my family is from one very small corner of Ohio. Our culture and our speech and our landscape is the same. For the people I love, I want to look at their places and be at home there and meet them there in the same way as I can meet my cousin Amber in scrubby woods off a highway. That is what family means to me and what love means to me.
A knowledge love, a learning love, sometimes feels like the only kind of love I have to give. I have never been someone with the capacity to feel things deeply. I am not a physically demonstrative person at all, except with Keel. I also do not usually feel comfortable talking about my feelings. And I don't miss people easily. I have always been aware that I don't feel things the right way, or enough.
And also I rarely feel attraction in a way that can map noticably to anyone else's experience, so that's a problem when it's the kind of relationship where it's relevant. Also, I am depressed, and I've felt about one positive emotion per week for several years now, and love is a positive emotion.
So it seems sometimes that learning things is all I have to give. And I have realized many times that sometimes learning things feels like oneupmanship. Like I want to be better at your thing than you.
But I don't want to be better at your thing than you, better never entered my mind once. I only want to be able to talk to you in the language of the place that is home to you.
I'm accidentally acquiring a bit of a specialty in British English. Only, however, Northern and Welsh English. I am doing, this, really, because of Keel.
This makes it sound like a lot less desirable than it actually is. I'm glad of it: it's interesting. I am easily interested in things, so anything that gives me research directions is good.
I am also making it sound less deliberate than it is. It's deliberate, in a way. This is how I show I love someone. By learning about the things and places and people they grew up being in and loving. In hopes that this will make me understand.
I am learning about Wales, and about the North of England, in a way that feels a little like converting to a new religion in order to marry a member of it. I am learning about it because for as long as I have known Keel, those two places have been of central importance to him and his identity. And so I am folding them into my academic work, because they are interesting and worth studying, but also because they are part of his heart, and I want to understand his heart.
I... understand the importance of place, because I left home some eight years ago and have been missing a small piece ever since. And so, I know how much of your Self can come and go depending on where you are. And I want to be able to walk with understanding in the places where his Self is whole.
This feels to me like a very deep and basic kind of love that I have always wanted to offer the people I care most about. I want to understand their places, and to understand their languages, as best I can.
Most of my family is from one very small corner of Ohio. Our culture and our speech and our landscape is the same. For the people I love, I want to look at their places and be at home there and meet them there in the same way as I can meet my cousin Amber in scrubby woods off a highway. That is what family means to me and what love means to me.
A knowledge love, a learning love, sometimes feels like the only kind of love I have to give. I have never been someone with the capacity to feel things deeply. I am not a physically demonstrative person at all, except with Keel. I also do not usually feel comfortable talking about my feelings. And I don't miss people easily. I have always been aware that I don't feel things the right way, or enough.
And also I rarely feel attraction in a way that can map noticably to anyone else's experience, so that's a problem when it's the kind of relationship where it's relevant. Also, I am depressed, and I've felt about one positive emotion per week for several years now, and love is a positive emotion.
So it seems sometimes that learning things is all I have to give. And I have realized many times that sometimes learning things feels like oneupmanship. Like I want to be better at your thing than you.
But I don't want to be better at your thing than you, better never entered my mind once. I only want to be able to talk to you in the language of the place that is home to you.
