A Love Story
Everything we do is because of love.
Years ago my twin called me, breathless, the way you sound when something has just cracked open in your chest and you have to say it out loud before it gets away from you.
“Jenn,” she said. “I just figured something out. Everything we do is because of love.”
And then she walked me through it. When we wake up and drag ourselves out of bed, it is for love. When we make breakfast, for ourselves or for someone else, it is for love. We go to work, yes, to pay the bills, but why do we pay the bills? To build a life stable enough to be loved in. To love from. Every ordinary act, traced back far enough, runs to the same source.
I let her talk. I didn’t tell her I’d already arrived at the same place. I just listened to her find it, watched her get gobsmacked by how simple it was, how it had been sitting in plain sight the entire time. Because that is the thing about the biggest truths. They are almost embarrassingly obvious once someone says them out loud. We don’t miss them because they’re hidden. We miss them because we’ve stopped being able to see what we’re standing on.
That’s the part I want to sit with. We’re standing in it, on it; it is in fact part of us.
Love is not out ahead of us. We’ve been taught to chase it like a thing on the horizon, something we’ll reach once we’re thin enough, accomplished enough, useful enough, good enough. But love was never the destination. It’s the ground. It’s the fabric underneath every step, woven into every action we’ve ever taken. You are not running toward it. You are running on it.
So why doesn’t it feel that way? Why does a life made entirely of love-seeking so often feel loveless?
Because somewhere along the way, the simple thing got complicated on purpose. The birthright got turned into a wage. We were handed a story that love is scarce, that it must be earned, that there’s a threshold of worthiness and we’d better keep paying to cross it. And that story is not an accident. It is architecture.
Build a world where love must be deserved, and you’ve built a world where someone gets to set the price. That is what every power structure is, underneath. A toll booth on a road that was always free. Make people believe the one thing that was never scarce is somehow running out, and you can charge them for it forever. The whole machinery of who’s worthy and who isn’t, who belongs and who doesn’t, runs on a single lie: that the thing you were born inside of has to be earned back.
And it works on us because part of us already believes it. There’s a voice inside all of us that says I am on my own, I have to protect myself, I have to prove I matter. We need that voice. It’s what gets us through. But that same voice, the one that insists we are separate, is also the one that can’t feel the love it’s standing in. The part of us built for survival is the part that struggles most to rest. So when the world whispers you’re not enough yet, something in us nods along, already braced, already reaching for more.
That reaching has a name we don’t usually connect to love. We call it the hunger for power. But power is just what it looks like when someone never learned they were already held. The hunger is the tell.
No one who knew they were loved ever needed to conquer anything.
Cruelty on a grand scale is just what love’s absence looks like when it grows up and gets its hands on something. The most powerful are so often the most starved, building bigger and bigger walls against an emptiness that no amount of power can fill. Because power was never the thing they were hungry for.
Which means the way out was never to earn our way in. We’re already in. We have been standing in the light the whole time, certain we were in the dark.
And here is the part that changes everything. If all of us understood this, truly understood that love is already ours, already here, in us and around us and underneath us, the power structures would have nothing left to sell. No one would hunger to dominate a world they already felt held by. The booths would empty. Not because we tore anything down, but because we stopped feeding it. You cannot toll a road once everyone knows the way is free.
That is the quietest, most dangerous truth there is. The tenderest thing you could say to another person and the most subversive are the same sentence.
You are loved. You always were. You don’t have to earn your way back to it.
We only have to look down to see that we were never alone, but we have always been...
Together.