These meanderings often begin with someone saying a word which catches my mind unawares.  It can happen in the most innocent of ways and is often a word which is part of everyday life; a word that is so overused that it’s true meaning becomes lost.

Today I was talking with a good friend and the conversation turned to love.  More specifically with my understanding of this word.  My friend frequently talks from a perspective of her beliefs: she studies many different belief systems and holds wide and interesting knowledge which I am more than happy to listen to.  Some of these things I discard, some I hang on to, some I worry over like a dog with bone often losing sight of the original thought as I grapple with understanding in a deeper way the topic in question she posed.

Today’s word, which triggered an emotional response from me, was a word that is frequently used in everyday life, and, in my opinion, overused so much that its true meaning can be lost.  That word is Love.

For me, Love is like a very rare jewel.  Something so precious it deserves special attention, nurture, care.  It is not something I learned to feel in my childhood.  It is not something I experienced fully, until I first held my daughter in my arms.  That initial recognition of my Love for my daughter, and eventually each of my grandchildren, was so intense it was scary.  These are the only times where I have felt anything approaching the reverence in which I hold that emotion of Love.  And my daughter rejected that Love.  From birth she built imaginary brick walls around herself, preventing me from getting close.  Maybe the love I felt was too intense – too much for her.  I don’t know.  It’s very possible. 

I said that I loved her father.  I said I loved my family.  I said I loved my dogs, but in comparison to my Love for my daughter and my grandchildren, that other emotion we call love is but a whisper. 

We also say we love a certain pair of shoes.  We say we love driving, swimming, smelling flowers, the comfort of our home, running into the ocean.  For me, these are things to enjoy, to take pleasure in, things which raise our spirits….  But love?  Compared with the depth of Love I hold for my daughter and her family?  There is just no comparison.

Three years ago a clinical psychologist diagnosed me as autistic.  She also diagnosed me with alexithymia – an inability to recognise emotion.  Not an inability to feel emotion, but an inability to name what it is I am feeling.  So when I struggle over a word such as love, and I have a grasp on an emotion I feel in every cell in my body and believe to be Love, and I know that it is an emotion which is not reciprocated, the fall-out is massive.  It is soul-destroying.  And that soul-destroying emotion is the closest I have got to Love in almost 50 years.

I was asked to list 100 things I love.  That is impossible.  There is only one.  Anything else is a mis-naming of other things which fill my life with joy, with happiness, with desire and pleasure.  I love the freedom of retirement.  I love my friends.  I love going to the foreshore, listening to the waves, feeling the breeze, talking with strangers.  I love the taste of scotch, and of chocolate.  I love writing.   Not one of these things is untrue – to a degree, but not anywhere near the emotion I, personally, understand as Love.  In each of these examples I could easily substitute the word love with ‘enjoy’ or similar.

Today I felt, in that conversation with my friend, the gap in my understanding of Love.  It is a gap which, most of the time I can ignore.  It’s not something I generally spend a lot of time delving into.  There are, after all, some benefits to being AuDHD.  Out of sight (or thought) is usually out of mind too.

And now, having written this, I have made a choice to accept that Love – as I prefer to know it:  the deeper soul-sharing Love and not the preference of one thing over another, is unlikely to happen in what remains of my life. 

But – I am not going to close the door on the hope that I can feel that emotion again and have it reciprocated – which is something I realised, as I stood under the light of the full moon, I have never truly felt.