Your Love And Where You Can Take It: A Motivational Manifesto Or Now You’re The Goddamn Star!

Do what you love!

Stop.

Do you feel love, doing what you’re doing right now?

Do you feel like a powerful star whose gravity holds aloft the very heavens? Do you feel warm and tingly? Both excited but also kind of dizzy? If so, that’s love you’re feeling. You’re that star, and from now on you should only ever feel like that.

You’re probably wondering: isn’t love a really big feeling reserved for important things like your newborn infant child or certain breeds of domestic dog?

The answer is yes, love is a very distinct sensation around which every other sensation fades in comparison. But it’s not just reserved for fundamental things like family or Game Of Thrones. You can and should be feeling love all the time about everything you’re doing always.

If you don’t love what you’re doing all the time always, you’re doing life wrong and you should fix yourself.

Anxiety, guilt, shame …Those are failure feelings. Abolish uncomfortable sensations by doing something you love instead. I hate voting but I love telling everyone that our government is lazy and wrong. I express my bliss by opening up to the stranger next to me in the grocery store about the government’s grossly irresponsible immigration policies and how they’re all here to take our jobs and blow up our newspapers because I love talking politics.

Love leads the way every time.

Quit anything you don’t love!

If ever you don’t have that warm, tingly, star shaped sensation that I mentioned before, quit what you’re doing right now and do something else.

The only way you are going to live, I mean really LIVE, is with love. Everything else is bullshit and failure. You are entitled to, nay, deserve complete contentment every goddamn minute of the day and the moment you are not bathed in the sunlight of unmitigated fulfillment is a moment of defeat and insufficiency; a signal you should immediately quit what you’re doing and do something else.

Wouldn’t you rather be mixing a bag of Lays potato chips with a bag of peanut M&M’s in a large bowl, heating it ever so slightly in the microwave (I call them Chippy Drip Surprises) and then balancing that warm crucible on your naked belly while watching an entire season of RuPaul’s Drag Race, than say; doing something you don’t love, like flossing or meeting your girlfriend’s parents?

Life is simple.

A life of love is the only life worth living.

Be independent!

When you really love what you do, you don’t need anyone else. You’re a self sustaining ecosystem powered by the love you make for yourself. You’re like a hippie’s weed farm where everyone showers in old rain water and stays warm by not trimming their body hair. But in a good way. You are so full up on self-love you couldn’t take any more, even if you wanted to. Who needs a family with whom you feel fulfilled and safe and supported when you can get those feelings from yourself, just from doing stuff?

If you 100% love what you do 100% of the time it’s literally impossible to need anything or anyone more. That’s math!

What do you trust more? A girlfriend with super soft skin but who is nevertheless very demanding about things like having a job and not falling asleep right after sex? Someone who just breaks up with you out of the blue because she can’t stand how much you love yourself? Who is named Sheryl and is obviously just intimidated and jealous of how much love I live with?

Or do you trust math?

Which one did they use to send a rocket into space?

Math or Sheryl?

Love math; love yourself.

Forget Sheryl.

Take Risks!

Being independent means no one can shame you for doing what you love. Go ahead and fill the comment sections on YouTube with your truth because you don’t need anyone else and you’re doing what you love.

You are a writer! A consumer advocate! A moral-political pundit! No matter what it is, I am doing it for me and I am doing it for love. Everyone deserves love. Are you going to tell me that I don’t deserve love? That I am not allowed to follow my bliss wherever it happens to lead me? Do I not get the chance to express my true self through the living of an honest life of love?

I love putting marshmallows between my toes and painting each nail with chocolate sauce before calling the dog to lick them clean. I don’t care that the dog is allergic to chocolate because he obviously loves it and I love both the ritual of lathering my digits in Nutella and the rough wet feeling of a tongue on my sensitive extremities. And if it kills him (which it really might, he looks positively sick with love afterwards) then he will have died doing something he loved, which is the only way to die.

And I mean seriously, Sheryl, you can get another dog. You loved picking out the last one, didn’t you?

Life is short!

Do you want to look back with any regrets? No, of course not. Lying on your death bed, or on your couch from which you haven’t moved in days except to make more Chippy Drip Surprises, or on the floor where you’ve fallen because your legs don’t work because of the diabetes; will you look back and think: I should have spent more time doing hard and boring things I didn’t want to do?

No! You will think: I lived a life of love!

I loved posting photos of every meal I ate on multiple social media platforms and I brought my whole soul to the task.

I loved letting the world know via hard-hitting, in depth conversations with whomever is sitting next to me on the bus, that I despise Anne Hathaway for having the gaul to walk around like a pixie haired scarecrow and I let my heart sing out with it! (I mean, come on, crying is not acting; it’s just crying. Everyone can do that. I’m doing it right now and no one is giving me an Oscar for it.)

And I loved many women. Many. A couple before Sheryl and totally probably many after. And the next woman I love will love me back enough to not laugh at me when I confess my deep fear of falling asleep while cuddling and accidentally smothering my loved one but not realizing it until I wake up in the morning and by then I will have spent hours cuddling a corpse.)

This is your life. Do what you love, and do it often. Live your dream. Wear your passion. Be yourself even if people like Sheryl tell you to change. Sheryl doesn’t know anything.

Sandy Williams (1979) is a dancer and choreographer living in Brussels. Even though he (he’s a he) is Canadian.