I thought this post was going to be a long list of reasons and ways to celebrate V-day alone, but the thing is…I don’t actually care about Valentine’s day.
I used to really love it, but I stopped loving it in first grade, largely because it became this thing where boys felt comfortable touching and kissing girls, and well we all know where that road led.
Valentine’s day is a beautiful holiday. It’s a great way for couples to reinforce the idea that they love each other. An excuse to get dressed up and go out, or cook a nice meal for each other. For a lot of people this is a reminder of all the reasons that they fell in love, and it forces them to think about whether or not the person they are with is their forever person.
For some of us however, it is a day of self pity, self loathing, and general self disgust at the fact that we are single, which obviously means that no one loves us and we are completely unloveable.
I promise you that Valentine’s day is not a day designed to make you feel horrible because you are emotionally detangled from a relationship. I know it feels that way, but the love card companies are not out to get you. They are merely capitalizing on husbands who cheat on wives, boyfriends who abuse girlfriends, and men who have essentially made the world we live in a horrible place for three hundred and sixty four days of the year.
Granted some of the men in this world who celebrate Valentine’s day are wonderful people who spend three hundred and sixty four days of the year trying to be the best version of themselves. But I don’t personally know many of those men, so this post is directed at those of us who are slightly bitter about Valentine’s day.
First and foremost stop making it about whether or not you are single. This whole year I have been touting the happiness I feel about being single, and I’ve realized that the reason that it sounds false is not because it does sound false, but because I am not supposed to be happy being a single person.
I’ve heard older women talk about this shit for years, but I never really believed them. We go through elementary school being told that we can be anything that we want in the entire world. We hit middle school and that lie is continued, and then we get to highschool and suddenly girls are expected to learn how to sew and cook.
Girls, specifically, are encouraged to join these classes, and sure there’s a few guys in the class, but that’s usually because every generation has that one or two guys in the world who aren’t complete sexist fools. They actually enjoy cooking and sewing because it makes them happy.
The byproduct of the commercialization of Valentine’s day is a convincing lie. It makes you believe that all these couples around the world are perfectly happy, and if you don’t join the club then clearly you are a miserable Brown bitch with three cats living with her mother at thirty-seven.
These commercials play so often and are so convincing that even before Valentine’s day has come and gone people are rushing into relationships they don’t really want to have and absolutely are not ready for.
I was talking to my friend and Budsista Chantelle Phillpotts the other day and we came the conclusion that romance itself is more about sex then it is anything else.
We also decided that sex has become all about the orgasm, instead of the exploration and connection of two human souls coming together.
I have been single for years, and while I haven’t always enjoyed it, I am certainly happier alone right now then I ever have been before. That’s largely because I have time to focus on the things that make me happy. I am writing, I am taking a writer’s workshop, and I am engaging with other writers who happen to be of a similar skin tone.
For the first time in my life I am being productive in a way that I am truly proud of. And it has come at the expense of having a relationship.
This isn’t just because I am absolutely a workaholic, it’s also entirely because where I am at emotionally, I am utterly unprepared to get into a relationship.
Right now I am still so raw and so damaged from the trauma and abuse memories coming back, that I don’t have the emotional capacity to add another human being into my life. Should I enter a relationship with anyone at this point in my life, I would have to focus on their needs, their wants, their desire. I can barely focus on fulfilling those needs for myself. I don’t have the energy to add one more thing to my plate.
If I want to make this my career then I have to focus all my energy on learning the skills I need to be successful now, and I don’t have time to split my focus. Some may say that this is my way of keeping myself safe, and to a certain degree that may be true.
However, it’s also my way of taking care of my mental health. Allowing myself the space to continue to release the darkness into the ether as I heal is important, because if I were to get into a relationship right now it would be doomed from the very start. I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in self sabotaging myself anymore. I’ve done that alot, and all that’s happend is that I have ended up miserable with the result.
I want to be in a relationship one day, but I want to be in a healthy relationship. I want to have a real honest to goodness partnership with someone, and that might mean that I’ll have to enter the dating pool at some point, but this Valentine’s day I am celebrating the love I have for myself.
I fought really hard to survive the things that I have been through. I have worked really hard to create a brand that I could be proud of, but more than any of that, I have worked really hard to become a better educated, more dedicated, version of myself.
I have put a lot of work into doing the emotional work I need to do so that one day I can enter a healthy relationship and skip all the drama that might be caused by fresh wounds of trauma and abuse.
I am still in the phase of my life where I am having nightmares, and I am not yet ready to share that side of myself with someone else intimately. I am perfectly okay with that, because by keeping myself a single person, I am ensuring the future of my mental health.
My only question is, why on earth would you think that someone who is still as damaged and raw as I am, should be trying to get married and have kids at this stage in my life?
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall
Loud Mouth Brown Girl 