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Falling In Love is Exhausting

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02.28.2021

White flag is a free monthly  newsletter on culture, gratitude, creativity, and surrender by artist Raquel Hazell, creator of saalt press. 

if you happen to find this issue interesting 

please share :)

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February's almost over, yall.

All that Walgreen's candy is finally 

on sale and I know you're hype. Now, as we come to the end of this most swoon-worthy month, and I wanted 

to talk a little about the valentines—industrial-complex and why I'm kinda

over it. 

Love and the human desire for love is inescapable. 

It's in our nature to seek 

out comfort, safety, and validation in others, and we try to find it in all the ways that we possibly can imagine—in friends, family, lovers, even behind enemy lines.

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I've tried many times in my life to be somebody worthy of love.

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bj

i've tried to make myself gentler, easier to deal with— 

 

 

                more     interested 

            in your           mixtape 

Someone you just can't stop thinking about fucking—

 

 

 

       someone 

    my mother        could be        proud of

And here I find myself, quarter of a life lived, alone on Valentine's Day—a first a long time—but if I'm honest I'm a lot happier than I've been in a long time.

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bj

I'll say this—through all my flaws and imperfections, the highs and lows of learning how to adult, and the pitfalls of love and love lost, being single is pretty awesome. 

 

Romantic attachment is something I, 

like many others socialized by Disney and tradition, have always assumed I needed in my life. I feel like I never really stopped to critically think about whether partnership is something I 
ever really wanted.

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And compulsory heterosexuality is a hell of a drug but more on that next month, maybe. I've realized the ways my fixation on "finding my person" was a convenient distraction from investing myself fully in the things that are truly important to me in this life.

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I think this year, watching us trip over ourselves in an effort to maintain an illusion that what we've been conditioned to do is well and normal and all that could ever be, I've come to the conclusion that I haven't been comfortable with my priorities in a 
long while.

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And I think the first step to figuring out what you do want, is by understanding what it is that you don't want:

get out my face

—

I do not want to love that requires I make myself 
un-whole, that requires I cleave parts of myself 
to make room.

+

I do not want a love that tries to convince me to 
turn away from my path.

+

I do not want a love that asks me to make them comfortable more than I make myself happy.

+

I do not want a love that asks me to ignore my intuition.

+

I do not want a love that leaves me unhappy and ungrounded when I am alone.

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Sometimes when I can't find the right words I looked to my elders and literary guides to help me sound it out. 

 

Toni Morrison knew how to write about love better than almost anyone who's ever lived—no surprise there—whether it be joyful, bittersweet, or tragically complicated.

So here are a few instances where 

she found the words for things I can only     

ever feel.

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bj

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Anyway, thanks for humouring my somewhat frazzled thinking through. 

All in all, I'm looking forward to all of life's sweetness coming my way. 

Love, 

Raq

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