Love saved me this year.

Of all things certain, love saved me.

“With love one can live even without happiness.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I have learned a lot this year, yet, clarity remains my favourite. I am the sum of the things I have liked, the places I’ve been, and the people I’ve encountered, yet I remain incomplete. There’s an x. The places I am yet to set foot on, the ones I am yet to love, the who I am becoming. June this year, I stood alone in my room with the lights off, my phone face down on the table, convinced I had finally reached the edge of myself. Everything I thought I was building felt like smoke, like something I had only imagined into being. I remember thinking, if clarity is so precious, why does it arrive only in the wreckage, only after the world has already taken its toll?

Several milestones reached, yet, a thousand subscribers on Substack feels like morning light. With fondness, I etch these words, a bit burdened with the weight of my esteem and steeped in the profound tides of my veneration for you, my cherished friends. Thank you.

These days, those strange craftsmen of time, now slip by with an eerie deftness. They pass their art to the years and follow suit with equal stealth. When was it, I wonder, that they merely named me and moved on? I remember a time I couldn’t properly wear a cardigan, now a friend of mine can remove a bra with his eyes closed. How we have grown.

Of all lessons publishing taught me, this one echoes loudest: growth is not linear. Your best post may not grab people’s attention, just as your best efforts may go unnoticed in other domains. Yet it takes only one post for everything to change. All you gotta do is to keep showing up. You will get your big break too. You must bear witness to your own turbulence before you seek an audience. My turbulence wore no crown of nobility. It appeared instead as deadlines slipping through my fingers like water, messages left to gather dust in their digital tombs, friendships I could not seem to cradle without letting fall, and a quiet shame that trailed behind me like a shadow through every room I entered. I sought no audience then. I was merely attempting to remain visible, to not dissolve entirely into the ether.

Of all emotions worthy of devotion, I love love. I honour the gift and the privilege to share. A glimmering jewel amidst the drudgery of existence. In sharing, our lives gain the faintest hue of purpose. Thus, today, it felt only right to share these words with you, as though breaking bread.

You likely know by now that I enjoy tucking fragments of my life into my letters. It’s my way of leaving a piece of myself with you. You’ve honoured me in this, and now I try to repay you with what I hold closest. I hope at least one of my letters matters to you, even half as much as your interest in my small passion matters to me.

Of all things necessary, community stands tallest. You must choose, my dear, to participate in the lives of others. I have wandered through dark valleys, and it is only those who truly love me that I rely upon to guide me back to light. It is a bond so firm that we ought never to entertain the thought of living without one another. Their interest in my endeavours lifts my spirits immeasurably. I cannot, must not, allow them to be disappointed in me.

It is a singular pleasure, indeed, to have someone for whom one’s thoughts and efforts are directed. To labour in solitude, with no one to care whether one’s pursuits flourish or falter, is a cold and barren comfort. How much more delightful, then, to know there are those who share in one’s fears, one’s hopes, and who even take part in the labour of realizing one’s dreams.

Choose your compass, yes, but let the road unfold as it will. What you possess, your heart, your mind, that quicksilver wit, these are enough. Command what lies within your grasp, and surrender the rest to the indifferent stars and their ancient choreography.

Build something that will outlast the evening. Love someone with the whole architecture of your being. Call a friend and speak the words that hover, unspoken, in the margins of your days. Give thanks as one gives light, freely, generously. Move forward, even if the movement is small, even if each step costs you something. Pain inscribes itself upon us all, but scars are merely the body's way of remembering it survived.

Life, with its glittering promises and gilt-edged illusions, looks upon you with something like wonder. You have been given gifts that dim the constellations, pure as first light breaking over water, gentle as summer rain on roses, wearing a smile that could resurrect belief in even the most beautifully damned among us. There will come days when doubt creeps in like fog, when you find yourself flickering like candlelight in a draft. But with the certainty of seasons turning, your patience will yield its harvest in gold.

There are still mornings when I wake to a dread I cannot name, something that sits quiet and heavy in my chest like stone. I do not always trust the future to be merciful. Some days I carry my hope the way one might carry porcelain through a crowded ballroom, trembling at every jostling shoulder, terrified it will shatter before I reach the other side.

Among all the year's revelations, one emerged luminous and undeniable: love has learned my name and refuses to forget it. Even on those dim afternoons when I permit myself to sink, when my own light seems extinguished entirely, love remains, patient, steadfast, arms outstretched like some faithful sentinel waiting for my return. In the year ahead, I mean to live inside this knowledge. To move through the world with less trembling, embracing both the terrible beauty and beautiful terror of existence, certain that love, whether borrowed, bestowed, or stumbled upon in the dark, will always, always be my salvation.

This show will continue. xx