The Secret Project

Around three weeks ago after my Christmas holiday and before the transition between 2015 and 2016, I went to visit my former music teacher - now a very dear friend - in Vancouver. She took me to this quaint little antique shop named Salmagundi West in Gastown, hoping to show me someone's apparently unique collection of animal bones. That wasn't the case though, that person wasn't there.

However, I saw something else. Lying quietly amongst many other whimsical items in that tiny basement of the shop was an old notebook. Written on the cover was an ear-catching, curiosity-piquing title: "The secret project". I stopped and opened that notebook. Inside, scattered across the pages without any particular order are plenty of secrets from assumingly the shop's visitors. Some are funny, some are downright nasty, but what stroke me the most was that almost all of the confessions/secrets written down in that little notebook headed towards one truth: "I am afraid to tell her/him that I love them."

"The secret project" got stuck inside my head since. And today, after having spoken to a friend, my memory of the notebook emerged. Why? I asked myself. Why are we so afraid of saying words of love, while it seems so easy to vent anger and frustration on others?

The fears of being rejected, of being denied, unloved, unwanted and undesired are legitimate enough to scare someone to death. I know people who would rather jump off a cliff than confessing their feelings. Love is wonderful and powerful. It is perhaps the single best feeling in the world: to love and to be loved. It is a dream, a wish, and for many, a goal to own that feeling. Therefore it's completely reasonable that anything that would make our dreams go up in smoke is utterly frightening and should indeed be illegal.

Just like you, I'm not a love expert. No one is actually. You can put on some goggles and examine brain chemistry, or recruit a bunch of people and shove them all into a lab to conduct some psychological experiments, but at the end of the day, there's no one-size-fit-all formula for this most abstract and most desirable thing in the world: love. I got my heart broken, got on quite a few roller-coasters of emotions, tried different things, and am still on a journey to explore this wonder.

Yes, I am feared of being rejected too. It's definitely not a nice feeling (even though I have to admit that sometimes the way I got rejected was pretty hilarious) and yes, it was very embarrassing right at that moment. Do I regret that? Hell no! And I would keep doing that over and over again. I can confirm right here that I'm mentally sane and clinically en forme, hence I personally believe that I'm not crazy.

In fact, there's another feeling that I'm afraid of a zillion times more than the feeling of being rejected or embarrassed: regret. The pain of rejection can be both tiny and humongous depending on each of us, and heartache is definitely the worst of them all. Yet, they would eventually be healed. Most of us are strong enough to move on and continue to earn our very deserved love. However, that feeling of regret would linger forever and ever. They will subside, but they would never be gone completely. And that haunting question of "What if" is just... sad.

With all that being said, I always view genuine feelings such as love and compassion as something that should be expressed whenever and wherever possible. We only have one chance to live, and I believe that we all should seize this precious opportunity to say (or whisper, or shout, or Google translate and then try to pronounce it, etc.) to that precious person or those percious persons in your life, that "I love you".

Now that reminds me, in that little notebook, a gentleman also wrote down: "I am finally going to marry the love of my life."

I wish that we would all one day write that sentence down in our own secret projects.

For me, right now, I'm going to call my mom and dad and tell them that I love them to the moon and back. I'm sure that they would question my mentality (our culture is not that verbally expressive), and that, for me, is bliss.

#love #amour #liebe