The Katmah Experience

Love comes in many forms. Love can be a noun, adjective and a verb. Love of something or another is what makes the world go round. Money, power, things, a person, a hobby or profession.. Every person runs into it in some form.

Love, at it’s best and at it’s worst, requires a healthy balance of almost every other emotion. When that balance is disturbed, love is usually what carries us through. It becomes the undertone behind what we do for both ourselves and for others, even if the decisions we make don’t bring clarity at first. In love lies the power to drive people crazy, but at the same time it provides us, if we look hard enough, with a mirror in which we face ourselves in a way we never saw before.

Every love is different, and every love has it’s own path.

Whether we fight it or let it encompass our being- this emotion will take us through highs and lows, sometimes being the cause and sometimes being the saving grace. When it comes to this between two people, it requires unending compromise and compassion. Romance and love are often two different things, and a relationship cannot survive on the expectation of another fulfilling ideals. Sometimes just because you love someone for all that they are: good, bad, and ugly, it also means understanding that they might not be ready to do the same. This fulfils loves requirement of patience and acceptance for others, but also yourself. There isn’t a perfect love, relationship, or person. Each time around there will be flaws, compromises, and straight up hard work.

Leo Tolstoy once said, “what counts in making a happy relationship is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility..”.

I have never been a believer in the kind of fairy tale love we grow up watching on screens and reading about in stories. The notion of love at first sight wasn’t even a sensible notion to me, until I had my own experience of a instant connection that luckily got the chance to develop into something more. While I’ve loved and love many things, I’m young when it comes to the all devouring love for another person. When I say this year has been an education in adult life, that is no understatement. As a 20-something I’m surrounded by relationships ending, soaring, and friends beginning the next stages of their life as either newly engaged, married, expecting, graduating, travelling, or starting their careers. Having merged from the single indefinitely-career focused young person end of the spectrum to now somewhere in the middle, I’ve grown a new understanding for where I see my life in the next few years. I’ve grown as a person in love, and because of that I’ve gained insight into many new things.

When I was 20ish, I read Meg Jay’s “The Defining Decade”. It’s focused around experiences and clients she has had who find themselves in their late 20s or early 30s dissatisfied with what they did with the first decade of their adult life. I remember reading the book and thinking I didn’t want to waste my time here. This is sometimes a hard philosophy to follow when most of society tells me “you’re only 22..you have time to think about all that stuff when you’re older”. This may be why most people assume I’m years older then I am, I’m choosing to figure out a lot of things now instead of letting time go by. I re-read parts of this book and always find new advice from it’s pages. I may only be 22, but I’m learning to find a balance between accomplishing everything I want to and having fun and learning along the way.