This February, join me for a different kind of love story. Seven days exploring how loving yourself first isn’t selfish—it’s how you become capable of the kind of love that changes everything. Because hope begins when you fill your own well.
Love is a force in motion. It builds when it’s shared and transforms everything it touches. But here’s the truth most of us learn too late: love doesn’t arrive from somewhere else. It flows from within.
Love Says: We’re Connected
We are hurting right now, beautiful someone.
All of us.
We’ve traveled some tough terrain together in recent years. A pandemic. Wars. Refugee crises. Climate disasters by the dozen.
We don’t just cartwheel out of these collective traumas. Recovery takes time. We need each other more than ever. And we need love, practiced actively, to flow between us.
Because here’s what trauma does.
It makes us want to close off. Protect ourselves. Retreat into isolation. It tells us the world isn’t safe, that people can’t be trusted, that caring too much will only lead to more pain.
And love?
Love is the antidote to all of that.
It’s what keeps us open when everything in us wants to shut down. It’s how we stay human when the world tempts us toward hardness. It’s the bridge back to each other when despair tries to convince us we’re alone.
Trauma says: Close off. Protect yourself. You’re alone.
Love says: Stay open. Stay human. You’re connected.
When Love Isn’t Love
But here’s an uncomfortable truth I need to share.
Some people have no capacity for love of any kind.
For most of my life, I didn’t understand this. I was perpetually confused, perpetually wrong, perpetually convinced I deserved nothing good. I didn’t know terms like “narcissistic personality disorder” or “gaslighting.” I just knew something was deeply wrong.
Here’s what I’ve learned: some people literally cannot experience empathy the way most people do. They cannot see other people as separate beings with valid inner lives. Instead, other people exist as extensions of themselves—sources of validation that must reflect them in order to be worthy of attention.
This creates what looks like love but functions like a black hole.
Understanding this didn’t erase the damage. But it did something crucial: it freed me from the belief that I was the problem.
I wasn’t confused because I was defective. I was confused because I’d been experiencing counterfeit love and being told it was real.
And I’m grateful for that experience now. Because I feel like an authority on love precisely because I’m an expert in its opposite.
I’ve studied counterfeit love the way a jeweler studies fake diamonds. Not by choice, but by necessity. Because my survival depended on learning to tell the difference.
Next: The road home. How learning to tell the difference between counterfeit and real love changed everything—and what happened when the velocity finally shifted.
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