Love As A Distraction

By ISabella Castello

“Hey Isabella, I recently got into my first relationship and am struggling with how it’s affecting my professional and creative drive. My writing used to focus around loneliness and desperation, which fueled my best work. Now, I have what I’ve been begging for, and that power is gone. All I think about is her, and I feel like no matter how hard I try, having what I want is never as powerful as desperation.”

I wrote this entry. 

Like I said… I finally got into my first relationship. It’s amazing, it’s easy, it’s fulfilling, and it’s fun. Really—there’s no secret regret, guilt, or longing. However, I’ve noticed that I have no ideas, no unique pitches, no new opinions. Where I used to use writing as a way to distract myself from my chronic loneliness, I now use that brain real estate to think about her and obsess over her every move and word. 

Finally, the life I wanted is in front of me rather than in my head, and it’s completely thrown me off my orbit. I feel guilty about my shifted focus, and guilty that I feel guilty about my shifted focus. My mind flips between unquestionable joy and fear of uncertainty. I’m often left wondering if I have any depth outside my gravitation towards loneliness. 

I’m using this entry to hopefully squash that thing buzzing in my ear telling me love ruined me. I know this is my problem, but I also know I give the best advice, so who better to ask what to do than myself? Hopefully, my inner dialogue will help one of you who was too shy to submit. 

When I tried to express my concerns to a friend recently, she replied, “It’s fine. You’re distracted with something new.”

I guess it’s that simple. I need to embrace this newness rather than dwell on what used to apply to me and work for me. After years of unchanging loneliness and insecurity, I made those feelings fundamental parts of my personality—at least, I thought I did. Now that I don’t feel those things, I feel like something is missing in everything I do despite the hole being filled with something I like. Everything I wrote, and you can fact-check me on this, was written with the help of jealousy, yearning, and desperation. Obviously, I wasn’t a peach to be around, but writing was my escape, and hopeless romance does amazing things for art.

In between the occasionally melodramatic sentences, I had passion—a passion for finding a passion, a passion for wanting, a passion for hopelessness. Now, what I feel passionate about is her, and the next time I’ll get to see her. I feel like I have no reason to write anymore because I no longer need a distraction from my, frankly, excessive desperation. 

Giving myself advice is harder than I thought. I know that it’s irrational to say I have nothing beyond my former loneliness. I know I need to let go of the idea that I can only write well when alone. I know there’s power, a lot of it, in passion for another person—there’s a reason the romance genre exists. But there’s a part of me that feels like a poser and like I don’t deserve to tap into that power.

Here’s to my first post, post love. Now, it’s time I explore how I feel about love from the perspective I never thought I’d know or deserved to know. Despite this post not really solving anything, I proved myself wrong—I found 500 words about something other than yearning… kind of.