❤️ My favourite stories about love, expansively defined

“The choice to love is a choice to connect, to find ourselves in the other” - bell hooks 💕

Welcome to Life after Trauma, a newsletter about what it means to survive. We’re getting ready to explore the intersection of creativity and recovery by taking part in The Artist’s Way. I really hope you’ll join us! Our goal is to explore our creativity in a gentle, low commitment way and to show up each week to cheer each other on.

Before we start, I have 3 quick updates to share:

1. 🌈 Huge thanks to

   Mr. Troy Ford
   for republishing my essay about getting engaged on QStack last week. I was honoured to be able to share this story with a wider audience!

💍 How I decided to get (gay!) married

2. As promised, I donated 100% of my January Substack income to the DSPCA in memory of sweet Budino. Thanks to my paid subscribers for making this possible. It felt like a beautiful way to honour his legacy.

3. I recently created an Index which will hopefully make it easier for you to find your way around my archive. It was the perfect, vaguely mindless task to do while wading through grief. I’ve written close to 100 articles, so there’s lots to explore!

   Index

Photo by Michael Fenton on Unsplash

Though St Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark holiday celebrating a Catholic Saint I don’t believe in, I still like to celebrate it. There is no other day dedicated to the awesome power of love, though I do think we ought to expand our thinking beyond the romantic paradigm.

I feel very lucky to have met my partner. We’ve been together for almost four years, and will be getting married later this year. (It’s always such a thrill to write those words!) Meeting F changed my life, but I was also changed by the steady pulse of platonic love, my sometimes-faltering attempts at self-love and the many years I spent single.

Last year, I published an essay & reading list about my single years. Here’s an excerpt:

For most of my adult life, I have been, in the words of Beyoncé, a single lady. I met my current partner in 2021. My previous relationship ended in 2009. For the intervening 12 years, I was single.

So much of life exists outside of romantic relationships, and I immersed myself in this realm. I embraced solitude, relying on myself for sustenance and happiness. It was an enormous gift to intentionally build a happy, fulfilling life, just for me.

Around Valentine’s Day, the internet is full of frothy, one-dimensional stories about romantic love so I want to share something different. What follows is a collection of resources about love expansively defined. There are stories about friendship, limerance, queerness and the detritus of love. It’s a collection of things I wish got more attention around Valentine’s Day, things that keep me going when love feels out of reach.

A page from my scrapbook