Sharing my letter from Love

Love, joy, and fun are your original factory settings

Last week, I invited any of you who’d been displaced by the LA fires to send me your fundraising links so I could share them here. Kim Grant, who lost her home in Altadena, wrote me and said “Our GoFundMe is going strong, but my neighbor doesn’t have as much reach and needs help.” As of this writing, Kim’s neighbor, who’d lived in her home for 56 years, is 36% of the way to her fundraising goal of $30,000. Let’s come together to support her.

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Hi everyone,

A few months ago,

Elizabeth Gilbert

reached out to ask if I’d be interested in contributing a letter to her Substack, Letters from Love. Was I… interested? Do bears shit in the woods? Do middle-aged women desperately crave their own island nation? This week, I’m honored and excited to be her featured guest.

If you’re not familiar with a “letter from love,” Liz describes it like this:

Open up a notebook (I find it’s most intimate to write this by hand, but you can use a laptop if you like) and write down this one question:

Dear Love — What would you have me know today?

And then allow the answer to come. What would the spirit of unconditional love tell you, if it had a voice? What does your heart need to hear today, in this exact moment? Where is the suffering, and what does it long to be told? What reassurance or comfort does your spirit need? Let the words come.

If you are feeling stuck, imagine what you would say to a dear and beloved friend, if they needed comfort or reassurance. Write those words — but to yourself.

Each week, Liz brings in a different guest to share a letter. In the post, Liz also writes and shares her own letter in response to the guest’s letter, and asks her community to do the same. The guest segments and community comments are accessible to paid subscribers, but Liz’s own letters and videos are free for everyone to read/watch. They’re always stupidly gorgeous bangers, for obvious reasons.

I didn’t know what would come through in my letter from Love when I sat down to write it, but it ended up being about allowing joy in my body, and reminding myself that it’s safe to be joyful. The letter Liz wrote in response to mine is a battle cry to life. The question she wrote to, and offered her readers, was Dear Love, what would you have me know about full-bodied joy?

I invite you to explore this one, too. Paid subscribers, please feel free to share your letters and/or thoughts in the comments!¹

This process was familiar to me, because I’ve actually been doing a slightly different version in my journal since 2010. It was taught to me as “having a conversation with your highest self.” I write out a question that the most average, pettiest, human-est version of myself is struggling with, and I channel the answer from my highest, wisest, most expansive, kindest self. (Which is essentially another way of saying “from Love.”)

And then, when my highest self is done speaking, my small little dumb regular self responds, and sometimes she argues or makes excuses or goes NUH-UH!, and then my highest self responds, and we go on like that until the process feels complete. This has been a profoundly transformative practice for me.

The entire point of this exercise is to not overthink it; this is meant to be an intuitive practice, not an intellectual one. And yet, as I share in the video below, when I sat down to write, I got all stressed out about making it good because lots of people would be reading it. Then I laughed at myself, because I wasn’t writing the letter, Love was. And it’s impossible for Love to be bad at anything.

If you’re a paid subscriber to Liz’s Substack, you can read my letter and watch my video over there, but for those of you who aren’t, I’m sharing it here.

The first few minutes of the video are me introducing myself and sharing how this process felt for me. If you’re the “cut to the chase” type, I start reading my letter at 3:07.

Here it is in written form:

My darling child,

Can we first stop and take a breath together? Isn’t that nice? This is how it feels to be in a body. We all remember the days when you walked out of your friends’ weddings as soon as the dancing started — you’d go outside and pretend you had a work call at 10pm on a Saturday(!), because you were so knotted up and disconnected from anything below your neck, and you were too self-conscious to even try to move your body around, and those mean voices in your head were just so cruel to your soft little self.

Sweetheart, you have come so far, and we’ve been with you the whole way. We rejoiced when you learned what a yes feels like in your body, and when you finally learned to say no to everything that doesn’t land in your body as peace and contentment. We held you as you let go of so much that had once kept you safe, and we reminded you that the first parts of growth feel like death, and you didn’t love that answer at first, but you trusted us, and see how it all made sense?

Three weeks ago, you took your shirt off on the dance floor at a New Year’s party and you didn’t even think about it! How’s that for growth?! We see you allowing yourself to be bad at things, allowing yourself to be loved, allowing yourself to change. We see you spreading your wings and evolving, and we are so proud.

And now, we would also like to remind you that it is safe to be joyful.

We know this was not always the case. You were raised in a house where you learned that life was a struggle to be endured, and joy was too great a risk; you learned if you dared to feel sparkly and excited, the cruelty of the world would come down and crush you.

You tried so hard to connect with your mom, and her greatest capacity for connection was through mutual suffering. There was so much injustice to be angry about, and so much vigilance required to navigate life. You learned that focusing on what was wrong, instead of what was right, was the only way to stay safe. And you can still hear your mother’s voice, telling you that the people whose lives were abundant, who were too happy — those people weren’t to be trusted. They were out of touch with the real world. A thing you never wanted to be.

My darling, we know that being in struggle feels familiar, and familiar feels safe. We know it feels dangerous to be too happy. But please know this: love and joy and fun are your original factory settings. In this world filled with ever-present tragedy all around us, to commit to your joy is a revolution. And you were born to be a revolutionary.

When your mother transitioned last summer, the part of you that was her fearful, careful little daughter was also set free. We can feel her so clearly from where she is now — and we know you can feel her, too — now that she’s been liberated from her own pain, she is begging you to allow yourself unrestricted, ungoverned, unfettered joy, to embrace pleasure and love wherever you can find it. It is safe for you to expand and fill the whole sky with your light. You are not here to have a bad time.

You’ve already done the hard stuff, my diligent little bean. This part is fun.

Please hear us: it’s time to turn your joy up to eleven. And please don’t forget that we’ve never been wrong.

Since leaving Em & Friends in 2022, creating a shop to offer prints/posters of my newer writing and art has been on my to-do list, but I’ve been resistant because digital illustration feels like WORK. The iPad was a tool of efficiency, not creativity, and I used it to churn out so many products for so many years that now, when I pick up an Apple Pencil, my brain goes BOO! HISS! GET AWAY!

But along with my letter, I knew I wanted to contribute an illustration to Letters from Love, so I got out my gouache and water-soluble crayons. And the process of creating the piece above was so damn joyful. So here’s my “duh” moment: I’m not over illustrating and lettering, I’m just over using a computer to do it! I want to work with paper and water and pigment, and I want to make marks I can’t undo and figure out how to creatively respond in the moment. In a world where everything feels faker by the minute, I want to make real, tangible things I can touch.

This is the long way of saying 1) it feels helpful to remember that sometimes, a “no” is worth digging a little deeper into, and 2) a print shop is definitively in my future.

As always, thanks for reading, and for being here.

xoxo,
Emily

1. I don’t allow open comments here, because when I tried it out, it wasn’t fun for me for all the reasons you might imagine: hostility, meanness, misogyny. It isn’t my intention to restrict participation to only those who can afford it, but paid vs. unpaid is the only designation I’m able to make on the back end: comments are either open to everyone, paid subscribers only, or no one.