Journaling project, Day 35

Love what you do, until you can do what you love. Love where you are, until you can be where you love. Love the people you are with, until you can be with the people you love most. This is the way we find happiness, opportunity, and peace.

How will you embody “love” today? What does this mean to you?

I don't even with this one. The entire thing reads like "lie to the world and everyone you're interacting with until you get what you want." SRSLY?

If you don't like your job then don't pretend to love it. Don't pretend that "love" is a toggle switch somewhere inside you that you can flip on or off at will. If that's how you're built... well, you do you but it sounds seriously icky to me. If you hate your McJob or the job you've had to take to pay the bills until you can find something in your preferred field then by all means don't bring that hate onto your coworkers, or your customers, or the people who are giving you a paycheck. But don't pretend to them either. If you're just doing something for the summer don't make people believe you're going to make it your life's work. Don't set people up for disappointment. Don't be a, in a word, jackass.

That's even more important with other people. I have been with people I didn't love, but I enjoyed my time with them, going to movies with them, listening to music with them, having sex with them. I found the emotional words to let those people know how and how much I valued those interactions, but never (I hope) pretended to love when I didn't feel it. I have seen people made miserable by situations in which they thought their level of emotional commitment was being matched, and it wasn't. There are jokes about "I asked her to marry me; she asked about seeing other people" that are stereotypical, but also based on reality. In heteronormative cis culture (ie Hollywood) we see stories of men "leading on" women. Which is to say, pretending to love someone they're with until they can be with the person they actually love.

If that's your path to "happiness, opportunity, and peace" please stay out of my life.

So to answer the question, I don't know what "love" is. I think I have an idea of what love is, without the quotes, and it's deeply rooted in honesty and authenticity. I think figuring out this concept and how it expresses in me is a life's work. I've told Pygment that there are, and will be, days when I don't feel love. That's a statement about me - about the baggage I carry, or the way some other emotions may swamp those feelings and it will require resolving those other emotions for me to feel the love again. I've also recently engaged with a therapist to try and understand the ways in which my chronic pain may have distorted my emotional responses. The way I embody love is by working every day to be as honest as I know how to be with myself first, and with those around me second. Because if I'm fooling myself (a thing I think we all do all the time) then I'm hampered in the truth I can bring to others.

Tell me how you embody love, please?

And while I have your attention (gaming)

I'm looking for another tabletop gamer. We play D&D 3.5+house rules and Pathfinder (1 I suppose I must say these days). We play Sunday afternoons. I have a preference for people who can be at most gaming sessions though games are set up to deal with people not present. We have a good-sized group in part so nobody feels like their absence is going to keep games from happening. We have one player who is attending remotely (by Skype) so that's an option, too.

I have a preference for a non-male gendered person, but I'll consider all people. The game is adult-themed, so please no younger persons (we've already told our teen "no").

Our game style mixes hack-and-slash with roleplay. Pathfinder play is usually through their prepared modules. D&D is a mix of modules and home-created content.

We don't do a holistic "everyone is out to save the kingdom/slay the dragon" shared goal thing. Rather, the group is friends and acquaintances that help each other... deal with the deep mystery of the city while avoiding getting overly tangled in its politics... and negotiate the running of a large merchant household far away from the Motherland, where home keeps trying to claw back control and by the way the guys who put you in charge of this household have apparently gone AWOL... while one member of the group has gone through the first rounds of training with a secret society that has completely changed his view of reality and now wants help completing his initiation quests... well, you get the idea.

Things are complex, and interrelated from time to time, and there is a very good reason why the party are currently trying to perform a near-miracle on the 45th Plane of the Abyss without everyone dying. We just might have lost track of that reason somewhere on the road to here.

Also, we have some pretty hilarious session notes.

If you're interested, or know someone who might be, leave a comment or contact me off-DW. I can't guarantee that I see personal email sent here.