True Love Will Find You in the End...

The other night, Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End” came up on my Spotify, and I was IMMERSED. This song has been covered by many artists including Beck, Wilco, The Flaming Lips, Crybaby, and Headless Heroes.

I just started playing the song while I’m writing now because I love to cry when I write (lolsob).

Here are the lyrics (I included a couple versions for you to listen to at the end):

True love will find you in the end
You'll find out just who was your friend
Don't be sad, I know you will
But don't give up until

True love will find you in the end
This is a promise with a catch
Only if you're looking can it find you
'Cause true love is searching too

But how can it recognize you
If you don't step out into the light, the light
Don't be sad I know you will
Don't give up until
True love will find you in the end

I love these beautiful and simple lyrics for so many reasons. It shows how we can only do what’s in our control, and how sometimes we need to be in a different light to see what the love can be or that it can even exist! I think the only line I don’t really like is “Don’t be sad” because sometimes we gotta embrace our sad! However, I think Johnston was encouraging us to not lose faith that love will come aka “don’t be sad” thinking love won’t happen for you.

One would initially think this song is about romantic love. And maybe it is. But in an interdependent, relational, and collective world, I prefer to think about love globally, wholly, fully. Love stories are so vast. They are about relationships with humans but also about relationships with our work, our body, our mind, the land. I have fallen in love with trees and leaves and flowers and the moon in ways that fill me up with immense meaning, care, and gratitude.

When I heard this song, I immediately thought about my mom. My healing story is so incredibly connected to her. My wounds looked like feeling hurt, gaslit, punished, misunderstood, quieted, and controlled, especially as a child. It wasn’t until I was away from her during college that I had any space to see how fucked up it all was.

When I made a conscious effort to excavate and examine what got me to where I was in my early 30s amidst my father’s death and my divorce, all I could think about was my deep mother wound and the deep anger I had toward her. I thought about the times she denied me any social life, the times she told me I shouldn’t feel certain ways, the times she yelled and cursed at me when I made the smallest mistake, how often she told me I wasn’t “listening” when I really just wasn’t doing what she wanted. It was belittling, confusing, and suffocating. Deep inside, I knew all of this was wrong, but I hadn’t realized the impact. I thought escaping from her force field was all I needed to rid that control from my life. Little did I see how much it led me to fawning and dismissing my needs in other relationships. I was capable of an Oscar-worthy performance, convincing myself (and trying to convince others) that abuse from my ex or friends was love. The fact is, before I began to excavate, I projected that same control onto others. I’d be FURIOUS if someone said I was anything like my mom, but, looking back, the writing was on the wall.

When I say your healing story is a love story, I’m definitely not saying that abuse is love—because it isn’t. But I am saying that what leads people to harm and bully others and what leads people to fawn and dismiss themselves, is because they seek love in a way that’s maladaptive, conditioned, and co-dysregulating.

They also have a love story they don’t know about yet because their healing story hasn’t unfolded. It isn’t my job to do that for them, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It’s there for all of us when we step out into the light…the light.

When I started writing about my mom, she wasn’t too happy about it. She said all I was doing was blaming her. I suppose it’s partially true. But for me (and maybe you) to heal, I had to unleash the anger and sadness stuck in my throat—rage that was too choked up and silenced to be expressed. They say “the only way out is through” and sometimes that means you’re running around screaming about what happened to you into the void in endless circles. It means that the way through has you bumping into a lotta nasty shit. It means sitting on the couch and crying because those tears weren’t available to you years before. It may mean withdrawing from the safest people around you because it’s what your body needs.

I am all about #FeelYourFeelings, and I also know that it is literally impossible to feel ALL the feelings we are having in a moment. While we can expand our emotional and physical capacity, this takes intentional time and effort. And we still might not be able to feel all of it because our body knows what we can handle.

Healing, returning, unbecoming, deconditioning, unlearning, boundary making, whatever you want to call it, isn’t always (or ever) pretty or cute, just like this brilliant reel demonstrates.

I now have a deep love for my mom, relatively free of blame or anger or frustration, because I decided to move through it. I’m not saying this happens for everyone. I feel my mom has also changed, which wasn’t in my control. AND I know that once I started making boundaries, and stuck to them, I noticed her shifting. I chose to be in right relationship with myself first so that I could love her by (1) creating loving distance (2) having the space to take some extra breaths (3) noticing MY patterns rather than perseverating on hers. Does that mean my mom doesn’t gaslight me or project her feelings onto me? No, she definitely does. I now have the space, tools, and awareness to not take it on, reinforce boundaries, and be kind to my body.

“This is a promise with a catch; Only if you're looking can it find you; ‘Cause true love is searching too…”

Like I talked about in “Your Healing Story is a Body Story”, your body will always send you messages when enough is enough. You can listen to it or ignore it. Either way, the body is our home and guides our life and death cycles…whether that’s about transformation or mortality. When I think about true love searching, I think about the many times my body told me “there’s better for you, there’s more for you, there’s different for you, there are other resources for you…including you”. It told me this through exhaustion, through delight that reverberated in my body when I wrote, through relaxation in my neck after I made a boundary, through inexplicable grief that comes up when your body sees you have capacity to experience it. After all, grief is love that has nowhere to go. Our bodies’ protection and signals are a compass that preserves what it can for future possibilities…future love. I think this is the best “catch” there can be.

“True love will find you in the end; You'll find out just who was your friend…”

I found out that I could be my own friend, that relationships that withered away after I began my excavation and made boundaries were not going to be aligned with my growth, and that can only happen when I step out into different lights and shades and everything in between. AKA…

• Nothing changes if nothing changes.

• What you allow will continue.

• It’s better to feel guilty than resentful.

If any of the above help you, awesome. The first and last have helped me A LOT in my life. I just heard the second and WOW, I really felt dragged. Did you too? Lemme know in the comments.

If you haven’t heard this sweet song, here are two versions: one cover and one original.

Headless Heroes cover:

And, here, Daniel Johnston' performs it live for KCRW:

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