I noticed that with repetition, the chants began to envelop my body. They allowed a vital energy to be released from my soul, an energy that had long been constricted in my chest. During the lengthy ceremony, some of us wept in between chants, some of us chanted loudly then softly, and some of us needed moments of silence. There was no judgment, no hushing, and there was always immense respect. It dawned on me while I was chanting that this was the first major death I had experienced. I realized that the purpose of chanting was not only to usher my grandmother peacefully into the afterlife, but also to release our grief into the ether. It gave us a safe space to express how much we missed her and loved her. There’s this trend lately, especially among online mental health communities, of encouraging cutting people off or walking away from anything that’s “not serving you.”

Mimi Zhu is that one stranger who you woke up to in your living room from the party the night before. Makeup is streamed all over her face and you ask her if she's okay and you make her a cup of tea. In his debut novel On Earth, We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong wrote, “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.” If we befriend only what feels good, we alienate our hurt. When we are judged by others and ourselves for weeping about separation, heartbreak, trauma, tragedies, accidents, and death, we push vital parts of ourselves away. The binaries of good and evil categorize our difficult feelings as evil, and our happy feelings as good. When sorrow is seen with self-judgment, it can generate a great sense of fragmentation within. Suppressing our sadness can grow into a cruel cynicism, making us scared of our own feelings and doubtful of the fullness of life. Intimate and heart-tugging, centered around radical love and rooted in a desire to heal . . . The book ispart memoir, part essay collection, and part spiritual guide, a rumination on healing and Zhu’s journey to rediscover what it means to give and receive love.”In that same essay on grief, Zhu recalls two distinct rites of mourning: a traditional Chinese funeral they attended for their grandmother, and a private ritual in which they wrote down slurs that X uttered on small pieces of paper and lit them on fire. “When we allow ourselves to be complicated,” they tell me, “we can heal and be more centered and intentional about our actions moving forward, instead of just pushing a part of us away.”

I think it’s really interesting how the truth feels the most free when I don’t feel surveilled. And so I found that transferring that skill into sharing was daunting at first, but I’ve really learned how to just be completely honest in what I share publicly because of the reception that I’ve gotten. I’ve realized that the posts that people resonate with the most are the most honest — the ones where I’m talking about my insecurities or my jealousies or my intrusive thoughts. And at first I think I wrote a little more surface level than that, more general, but as I’ve kind of been running this account and doing my newsletters for a while, I’ve really found that people resonate the most with when I reveal how messy my emotions are and how insecure I can be, how complicated my healing has been instead of me portraying some kind of picture-perfect reality of myself. If you are still willing to take on the challenge of courting someone who is afraid of love, here are some tips that would help increase your chances from zero to maybe. Take it slow Make a conscious effort to think about the things that drew you to your new partner. Think about how much they make you laugh or how thoughtful they can be. Note how different these characteristics are from your last toxic experience with love. Putting relationship baggage in the past doesn’t mean forgetting it. It simply means not letting it affect your current relationship.Fear of Hurting Someone Perhaps you have hurt people in previous relationships and it made you feel guilty. As a result, you might want to avoid getting into another relationship and causing the same pain to someone else who you care about. We must remember that it is not love that that we are afraid of we fear the abandonment betrayal violence and abuse that come with the complexity of human trauma and the relationships” If you are the martyr type who is in love with someone like that, don’t fret. It’s not the end of the world. There is still a way to turn things around in your favor. It will just take time, a lot of time.

Be choosy about your partners but don’t demand perfection. Sometimes we fear love because we demand perfection from ourselves and our partners. It’s important to be selective about who you get into a relationship with because people can hurt you or be abusive. It is absolutely not asking too much to be treated well in a relationship. However, if you constantly look for any little flaw in your partner, you will always find one because people are flawed. The key is to find a respectful partner who cares about your needs and feelings and go from there. With respect and kindness as the basis of your romantic relationship, there is a higher chance of success and less anxiety for you. [15] X Research source Sometimes we find ourselves anxiously asking questions such as “What if I get rejected?” or “What if I get hurt again?” If you find yourself asking these worst-case scenario questions, try following through and answering them. For example, you might tell yourself that if you get hurt again, you’ll learn from that relationship and know what not to do the next time. If you put yourself out there and get rejected, then it will hurt for a while and you will eventually heal from it. [3] X Research sourceTalking about the future will have the same effect. It will remind them how they once had a future with their ex and how everything broke apart like a house of cards. Everything will take time. The moment they are in love with you, they will deny it. They will do all they can to remove you from their lives. She holds it close to her chest, this cup, and she says, "As a kid, whenever I felt incredibly angry or sad, I'd imagine this mug, warm and all, so close to my chest and everything would feel a bit calmer." Accept past failures. Nearly everyone’s fear of love comes from worrying about past relationship failures, either your own or ones you were a witness to. To overcome a fear of love, it’s important to remember that you are not your mistakes. Leave them in the past and don’t keep beating yourself up over them. [6] X Research source In their early twenties, queer Chinese-Australian writer and artist Mimi Zhu was a survivor of intimate-partner abuse. This left them broken, in search of ways to heal and find love again. They found that in words. In sharing their own intimate encounters with oppression, healing, joy and community, Mimi invites readers all over the world to reflect deeply on their own experiences, with the intention of acting as a guide to undoing the hurt or uncertainty within them.

So before you begin and waste your time, decide to either go through with it till the end or quit while you haven’t lost anything yet. If you do end up trying, you will have to give it your all, and it may take years to achieve a breakthrough. Zhu constantly finds the political within the deeply personal, and vice versa. They don’t shy away from revisiting generational trauma in their family, which was impacted by their move from China to Australia, or delving into painful memories with ex-lovers. In one poignant section of Be Not Afraid of Love, Zhu processes their ex’s Asian fetish, drawing a line between X’s sexual interests and the history of orientalism, Western domination, and white supremacist ideology. I’ve been writing for a long time, but taking the step to post publicly was a really big one. Privately, I’ve been writing for 10, 15 years now. I’ve always had journals that I really am devoted to writing in every single day as much as I can. But obviously I think taking your work out of a journal and sharing it is again such an intimidating experience. I think all writers should start with stream of consciousness writing, getting that energy out. For me, it was always an energy release, and it was really helpful because I knew and felt so safe in the fact that nobody would be reading it. But interestingly enough, because I had felt no pressure and I felt no eyes on my work, I would write some of the best stuff that I’ve ever written. For example, if you are worried about being rejected, you might think something like, “She’s way out of my league. She’s going to dump me.” Or, if you feel unworthy of being loved you might think something like, “You are too ugly for anyone to ever love you, so don’t even try.” Sometime after the rekindled relationship ended, I performed a long overdue funeral for the soul of our lost love. On small pieces of paper, I wrote every slur he had ever called me that was etched into my mind. This was an extremely painful practice, because I had to recall so many of the vulgarities that still lived within me. Each time I wrote something down, it felt like an extraction of poison. Looking at these slurs on paper allowed me to see that they were not inherent parts of me but lived outside of me. They were projections used to invoke fear in my spirit, and at the same time were reflections of the fear that lived in X’s heart. Twenty scattered pieces of paper surrounded me in a circle, and I read each of them out loud, burning them one by one. I cried as I read them, and I felt myself missing him too. This was a ritual of release. I watched them turn into ashes and realized that I was initiating a long overdue funeral service of my own. I allowed myself to weep as loudly as I needed to. I wept about the pain, the violence, the abuse, and for the first time in a long time, I wept for me. Grief is an ancestor who teaches us to exercise constant and immense gratitude.Reminding that person of the reasons why they are afraid of love in the first place is taboo. The last thing you want to do is to ruin all your efforts by reminding them why they do not want to be in a relationship with you (or anyone else). They cannot stop themselves from falling in love (again), but they can stop themselves from being in a relationship . The easiest way to do this is by entering the dreaded friend zone .