Love, Valentine’s Day, and The Love that was Sitting Beside Me
I’ve never liked Valentine’s Day.
It’s odd for a hopeless romantic; I don’t believe in how love is presented on this day. It’s too "Hallmark." There is this pressure to show up in specific, loud, public ways just for love to be considered real. It’s a performance that lacks authenticity. Often, it creates chaos instead of connection. It pressures people to perform rather than connect.
Yet, love is one of the most powerful emotions a human will experience. It is deeply healing, but it can be deeply painful. Life isn’t black and white; every profound emotion carries its own opposite effect.
When you lose someone, you hurt. It’s like the pain where a paper cut meets a bleeding toe—a dull ache that travels through your nerves 24/7. It is the paradox of feeling dead while being more visceral and alive than ever. That pain is a universal fear, a process we all must learn to navigate with time and grace.
Sterling and me, Summer 2023.
I mean… who wouldn’t fall in love with those eyes?
In the summer of 2023, I was finally emerging from a long battle with depression. I was just beginning to feel the breeze's scents making me whole again. What I thought would be my final breaking point became an awakening to how much life steals from you when you are in that depressive phase.
This is something many therapists and psychologists miss: when people are struggling with depression or anxiety, their entire being is focused solely on surviving the pain. We are in a state of profound vulnerability, where the mind has no space for rational thought or for attending to others' needs. This is why, when I work with clients, I look at their pain from a 360-degree perspective. I assess trust, financial stability, and basic self-care, like eating. In those moments, people aren’t careless—they’re consumed by survival.
During my own "dry" depressive space, I trusted people who took advantage of that fog. While I was busy rebuilding roots, people I called friends were spreading rumors and tarnishing my character. I had finally walked off the battlefield, only to realize the enemy had been sitting next to me and I was too blind to see it.
I remember sitting in my car at a red light, thinking: How can I ever love again? I will never ever fucking love anyone again. I was struggling to move forward after that kind of betrayal. The thoughts in my head were so loud and exhausting that I couldn't feel the stillness inside the car.
In that moment, I forgot I wasn’t alone.
The kind of eyes that make the spitballs… irrelevant.
Suddenly, I felt a warm, moist breath right at the edge of my cheek. My immediate thought was, please, please, PLEASE don’t spit on me. If you’ve ever been close to a French Bulldog, you understand. I slowly turned my eyes—without moving my neck or my face—just enough to check while trying to avoid any spitball damage.
And there they were. Two big, beautiful, warm brown eyes looking straight at me without blinking, firm and kind.
I had seen those eyes before, but this moment was different. There were so many words of compassion in that gaze—innocent, presence, unfiltered—that I don't have language for. In his silence, he flipped my heart. I don’t know if he got spit on my face; he probably did. But I forgot to care, because I felt my heart drop in my chest. I felt love.
Unmistakably. Love.
I went from "I will never love again" to "Omg I just want to love the shit out of you, why are you so fucking cute?" That moment changed my summer. I went from thinking it would be a horrible season to having one of the best summers. It wasn't because everything was suddenly okay, but because that moment because in that moment I realized I had gone from sitting beside the enemy to sitting beside pure love—and I had been so busy holding onto what was done to me that I was missing love itself.
Sterling leads with his heart in everything he does. The way he eats, the way he looks at people, the way he takes a nap. There’s no hesitation in him. The morning hugs he gives you. He just loves to love. Without fear. He follows his heart, moment to moment. Without condition.
We, on the other hand, are conditioned constantly. We absorb ideas about how love is supposed to look, when it’s supposed to arrive, and who it’s supposed to come from. We begin to assume that if we replicate that form, we will finally feel good, too. But in doing so, we stop looking for the feeling itself and start chasing a picture someone else painted for us.
I’ve sat with clients who have accomplished incredible things, only to say afterward, I thought I would feel different. They weren’t ungrateful or self-sabotaging. They believed the achievement would give them a specific feeling, and when it didn’t, everything collapsed, depression said hellow and motivation said goodbye. They realized they weren’t even chasing what they truly wanted; they were just chasing the belief that a certain scenario would produce a certain emotion.
If you find someone who looks at you the way Sterling looks at his banana, hold on to them. I promise you—they love you.
I did the same. I thought a specific relationship, a specific set of friendships, a specific scenario would finally make me feel whole. Sitting there, looking into Sterling’s eyes, I realized it was never about the scenario.
That feeling—the melting in my chest, the "I’m here, and I love you" feeling was sitting next to me. I just hadn’t recognized it because I was expecting it to arrive dressed differently.
This was the awakening: not that love appears in unexpected places, but that we miss it when we stay attached to how it’s supposed to look. When we do that, we trade lived experience for hollow expectation. We keep pushing love to arrive through conditioned scripts—the movies, the narratives, the psychological rules—and in doing so, we overlook the unconditional love already surrounding us.
Love isn’t loud.
It doesn’t follow scripts.
It doesn’t announce itself.
It’s right in front of us, waiting for us to see it and trust it.
And the moment we become truly present with it, perception shifts.
That’s how a season that begins in betrayal and depression becomes the most unforgettable summer of your life. It doesn’t take a miracle—it takes presence and realizing the love you are chasing is already sitting beside you.
And that’s how life resumes—
not with answers,
but with movement.