Love and Courage
How a Valentine's Day card from my parents helped me clear the way to Courage and changed my life
A Brief Note: This post is part of a monthlong series celebrating National Coming Out Day on October 11, 2023. Coming out as gay was the first significant Journey of Courage in my life, and strongly informs my own ideas about Courage. I’m writing this series not just for queer people, but for anyone who has ever held a meaningful part of themselves inside.
October 1: Love and Courage
October 8: What Coming Out Taught Me About Courage
October 15: Coming Out, Again
October 22: We All Have Closets
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On February 14, 1999, I woke up to a Valentine’s Day card from my parents. I was a sophomore in high school in the suburbs of Chicago.
Receiving a Valentine’s Day card from my parents wasn’t a family tradition of ours. To this day, they can’t remember why they wrote it that particular year.
By that age, there was no denying to myself that I was gay. But I felt nowhere near ready to share that. I was stuck in a cycle of yearning and bargaining—I yearned deeply to be out and yet I bargained fiercely to protect my own sense of security and status.
That winter, I had slowly descended into a closet-induced depression of fear and inertness. I’d come home from school after theater rehearsal, toss myself onto our TV room futon, and fall asleep within moments.
And so when this Valentine’s Day card appeared, I shimmied open the envelope, and pulled out a short, hand-written message.
Dear Elliot,
Happy Valentine’s Day! We love you so much, and each day we love you more and more. We couldn’t be more proud of you, and we love seeing the person you continue to become.
Love,
Mom and Dad
Four days later, I came out to them
The card didn’t express anything I didn’t already know, yet I held onto it like a key to another world.
Suddenly the possibility of coming out felt imminent. I had been standing endlessly at the doorway to Courage, unmoving. It’s okay to walk through, whispered the card.
The card served as hard evidence of unconditional love as well as a form of collateral. I could feel it in my hands and know it was real. And as I wondered how my parents might respond to my being gay, the card was an insurance policy ensuring my worst fears of being rejected by them would not materialize. (They didn’t).
Had my parents not left me the card, it’s hard to say when I ultimately would’ve come out. Perhaps my exhausted body would’ve forced me to find another reason to come out and the result would’ve been similar.
But at the time, my plan was to wait years, convincing myself that college would be the ideal time. It’ll be easier then, I thought.
In hindsight, there’s no indication that anything about college would’ve made things easier. It’s possible it would’ve been more difficult without the physical proximity and connection to my family. And more importantly, prioritizing the ease of coming out over the myriad benefits of being out seems so obviously short-sighted now.
In the alternate universe of waiting until college—of not practicing Courage when I did—I would have missed truly formative coming-of-age experiences as a gay teen. I wouldn’t have had the chance to:
experience and share my absolute euphoria when I came home from my first queer youth group;
spend summers performing queer stories on stage with other youth in the city;
play spin the bottle with other boys and do the cha-cha slide at queer dance nights;
date three different guys in high school and take one of them to prom (the first in my high school to do so);
and have my heart broken, subsequently buying a “Boys Drool, Girls Rule” pillow I came upon at my local Bed, Bath & Beyond.
One of the greatest cruelties of Courage is that we can never fully imagine or know the aliveness that might await us on the other side of its doorway. Discovering what awaits us requires a knowing that we’ll continue to be whole on the other side. And that’s where love can play a singular role.
Love clears the path to Courage
Regardless of any skepticism you have about love, can you consider how it might be a lubricant for Courage and how it might help you access more Courage in your life?
Personally, I’m not naturally inclined to lean into love as a means of moving myself forward, but I’m starting to consider it as an important lens.
What I know is that the Valentine’s Day card I received from my parents—that direct connection to love—instantly accelerated my ability to practice Courage. Love cleared the path for a quantum leap, taking me from “maybe someday” to “right now”.
It immediate released me from the yearning-bargaining cycle, taking me out of my present concerns and helping me see the bigger picture.
Love has a way of being able to bypass all the what-ifs, the fears, the uncertainty, the feeling the floor might fall out from under you. Possibly more powerfully than any other tool, love turns down those thoughts and gently leads them into the other room.
Connect to love, connect to Courage
What happens when you can hold love in your own hands, like a Valentine’s Day card? What might you feel safe enough, compelled, or even obligated to do? If you’re able to strengthen your connection to love, I suspect you’ll be able to strengthen your connection to Courage.
The challenge is that, like Courage, we tell ourselves many unhelpful myths about love in our society.
Like Courage, we hold strong and limiting ideas about who gets to claim love, how it looks and feels, and when we can connect to it.
Like Courage, we often wait for someone to give us love rather than try to cultivate it within ourselves and tune into it around us.
As a result, we don’t notice love even when we’re directly in its presence. I mean, why do you think I needed a Valentine’s Day card to really see it? If we can’t see it, we miss the opportunity to leverage it.
And so I want you to examine your own relationship to love and put it in your hands. I’m talking about all types of love—being loved by others, receiving love, loving yourself, loving others, seeing love in the world. They’re all part of the same flow.
So simply:
What’s your relationship to love currently? What do you want it to be?
How does love connect to Courage for you?
How might your love help someone else connect to their Courage?
Love,
- Elliot
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Wow Elliot! I’ve never made the connection with Love & Courage. Thank you for sharing your testimony to teach how love opens the door to courage.