I want to be loved! Doesn’t everyone?

The first time I listened to Caroline Polachek’s “Spring Is Coming With A Strawberry In The Mouth” it made me cry.

Now, I really am not much of a crier. The most recent instances in which an abnormal amount of water has escaped my peepers were 1) when I was watching a video of a very cute seal at the pregame, 2) when it was windy a few days ago and the gusts of air hit my eyeballs full force, and 3) when my dog died. All this to say, if I am crying, it is either very unserious or very serious. I would sort my Caroline Polachek-induced tears into the “very serious” category.

See, it was the intro that got me. “There are so many things I want. But mainly, and like everybody, I want to be loved.” When I heard that, I was like…well yeah, that’s the thing, right? I’m not sure quite why it made me cry. It might have been the simplicity of a sentence I had been searching for for a while. The words seem so greedy in such a preposterous way, asking somebody to love you. Because even if the person or thing or blade of grass you are asking to love you, says that they are going to love you, it doesn’t mean that it is actually going to happen. Not in the sense that love doesn’t exist (it does), nor in the sense that it is this elusive rare Pokémon type experience that you can only sometimes catch with an Ultra Ball. It’s just that you can’t predict the future. Stuff happens.

Before I go on, I must make it known that I am not a pessimist about love. I believe in love entirely (thats why I am writing a whole blog post about this duh), and I believe that true forms of love supersede what we often consider the boundaries between romantic and platonic relationships and not in a gaslighting you into a situationship kinda way. I have a lot more to say about this, but I have gone on a tangent. I can save this for another blog post. We must circle back to Caroline Polachek.

So I thought, well Caroline Polachek is a smart lady. She must have known that you can’t really ask someone to love you and expect to be told the truth. Then I thought about what she said again and realized that’s not really what she is asking for. She says that she wants to be loved, not that she wants someone else to love her. That is something entirely different. To be loved acknowledges both love from another person and accepting this love for oneself. I think the song made me cry because I had been mistaking my inability to accept love from others as a lack of love from others. That is the hard part I suppose.

I am very lucky to have a lot of people in my life who love me, a metric ton if you count the people that comment hearts or “Love!” on my mom’s facebook posts of me doing stupid shit as an infant. But for a while, I was content to turn a blind eye to those who love me, I was too self-absorbed or self-loathing to care. When I figured out I had to open myself to love, I realized there was a lot there for me.

I also didn’t realize how many Facebook posts of me my mom made. I had her blocked lol. When I unblocked her, I realized there were a lot of hearts and “Love!”‘s and I thought that was nice.

But the real kicker of this whole thing is that after pondering Caroline Polachek’s words for an embarrassingly long amount of time, I discovered that “Spring is Coming with A Strawberry in the Mouth” wasn’t even written by Caroline Polachek! What the Heck! Hey that rhymed. Props to Roger Doyle/Operating Theater, it was pretty awesome of them to write this song, though I think Caroline Polachek did a fantastic cover.

Anyways, love is real. Thanks!