Here’s Your Permission Slip to Take Yourself on a Date in SF

For those in a state of singledom, Valentine’s Day can be hard — but that’s not to say you can’t show yourself a healthy dose of self-love.

Hey babe, I know today, February 14, is a rucksack of mixed feelings — a wicker tote crammed with emotions that oscillate between varying states of fluidity. The insistent push ads on Instagram double as both sources of nausea and nostalgia. Twitter is flapping with threaded odes to loved ones, past or present (or deceased), where sights of clinking champagne glasses ring in your heart like excited smoke alarms.

You’ve also been busy. You’ve also been stressed. You’ve also been overthinking. You’ve been defining what it means to be a content human being in this time on planet Earth, too. You’ve also been living through a global health crisis that’s now killed nearly a million Americans.

I get it; I get all of it.

The very fact that we’re holding physical, tangible, measurable mass on this finite planet is inherently enough.

Today, February 14, pulls at your heartstrings. But those yanks are neither synchronized nor unidirectional. Like cephalopods moving over exposed ocean rocks.

You’re in an ambivalent state of affection, something you undeniably wax to friends, to family. That feeling of unvarnished happiness from the platonic connections in your life envelops your cellular being; every fiber that makes up the tapestry of your soul. It lifts you from one moment to the next. Across branches that would otherwise break under the weight of too many broken hearts.

Rumination of failed love sets in. You’re like me — going through your camera roll. Filtering through text messages between potential somethings that dissolve into nothing; you can’t seem to rid your phone of their unsaved numbers. Flickers of time that was neither wasted nor, in the end, wanted; it just passed by, which perhaps stings even more. Warning signs and glowing firework nights that, regardless of their initial spark, have since faded into blackness and empty bottles of wine.

It can take just five whole minutes to find a thousand pieces of broken glass inside your mind when it goes off its rockers. And lands on your iPhone. Or inside your inbox. Likely both, if we’re being candid.

This is the danger zone. That precarious place where gratitude for a life being well lived can sink beneath self-ideated destitutions. You and I like to catastrophize everything. Molehills in our presence don’t merely grow into mountains. They mound into active volcanoes that spew broken, bitter ash onto everything around them — them here symbolizing aspects of our lives.

Fuck, it sucks. Doesn’t it?

And I get it; I get all of it. Again.

It can take just five whole minutes to find a thousand pieces of broken glass inside your mind when it goes off its rockers.

The narratives that swirl around our heads this time of year (on this particular day, especially) circumnavigate all manners of scarcity. That we’re not enough; that our work is not enough; that our bodies are not enough; that the spaces we occupy are not enough.

But we are enough in all multitudes; let’s flip that script.

Meet yourself behind the mall.

These inalienable rights belong to us and should exist outside the canon of a romantic relationship.

Ok, I’m dragging on; I’m fumbling over my own two wrists and tired fingertips. But, yeah.

You get it, too. You get all of it, too.

I want you to have this note as permission to always celebrate you in whatever way you see fit during any single moment. Because I know you’re too humble — too exquisitely gracious and extraordinarily benevolent — to be so deservingly selfless to write this for your own use. Kindness is an evergreen construct that applies to those around us and ourselves. Please remember the latter part of that sentiment in those lower moments of the soul, cherished biped.

Sometimes getting our shit together isn’t actually about getting your shit together.

Dance in the living room to popstars, the creak of hardwood floors now concerts of thankfulness; red wine meeting your lips, sweet as realized revenge against your hometown skeptics. Your mother’s ring inside your denim pocket rubbing against your outer thigh. What a life to be flush with the promise of shrinking regrets.

Take to the hills outside your apartment. Hold the midday sun like a long-lost friend. Those weekends when you come into the city, don’t forget to take the tiled stairs that lattice it like spines — each vertebra a step closer to a semblance of appreciation that, for some reason, didn’t exist before it. How we can be so intolerant of simple joys remains an anathema. I’m happy we’re at least working on it though, aren’t you?

There’s a certain, peculiar, unassuming feeling of self-satisfaction knowingly making a dinner reservation for one. Then buy a movie ticket for one. Then having a drink poured at a local dive bar for one. Then walking home, by yourself. This is not a lonely exercise, no. If anything, such a night out stands as a radical act of fondness for the autonomy you’ve so consciously crafted in your life. Meet yourself behind the mall.

Polish the dishes. Get your desk all sorted out. Respond to those unread text messages; realize they don’t need to be tailed by apologies. Buy that Dyson to rid your rent-controlled apartment of lint castles.

Sometimes getting your shit together isn’t actually about getting your shit together at all. It’s about putting pieces back together to remind yourself that you’re entitled to order, to discipline — tenderness, acceptance. And the mirrorball gaze of soft summer loves you haven’t met yet.

Take yourself on a date, babe… however, you want to define that act of self-celebration. Wherever, whenever you want to. This is your permission slip to do just that.