PS C:\> tar -xf Feel_The_Love_MP4.zip
Source_Code.txt
The open-source code below is free, for you to analyze, modify, and build your own application with.
There is a song called “Feel the Love” by Rudimental. I cannot listen to that song without moving my body. I cannot listen to it just once. That song speaks to me at levels many other songs simply do not. And I danced to it. On camera. By myself. In an empty parking lot in front of the Bellingham Municipal Courthouse on a gray cloudy day. Because I couldn’t not.
Because for the first time in my life, I can actually feel it. Not as a concept I have studied and written about and convinced myself I believed. As a felt thing. In my body. In my chest. Moving through me when the bass hits.
Can you feel it too?
I have written before about how I am love. About how love isn’t roses and gestures and Valentine’s Day. About how it lives in every cell, radiates outward without effort, and is simply the act of wishing happiness for everyone around you and yourself. I have written about loving my exes, loving people who have hurt me, loving strangers who show up exactly when the universe needs them to. I meant every word of it.
But there is a difference between knowing you are love and actually feeling the love coming back.
I feel it now. I have made space in my life for the people who love me unconditionally. The ones who accept the person I am becoming instead of defining me by a past I no longer live or participate in. The ones who are watching me become someone unrecognizable and cheering instead of flinching. I feel their love all the time. I am so grateful for them.
I am so grateful for them.
For most of my life I could not receive love. I could perform it. I could chase it. I could try to earn it and control it and cling to it and destroy it the moment it got too close. But just let it land? Just let people love me without immediately wondering when the conditions were going to show up?
I know how now. And it turns out the whole trick is becoming someone you actually like. When you stop running from yourself, you also stop running from the people trying to love you.