Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Writing Love Letters to the Universe With Sarah D Little

Episode Date: July 6, 2022

On this episode of “The Language of Love,” I sit down with Sarah D. Little. Sarah is a dear friend of mine. She is a beautiful, passionate writer who knows firsthand how painful trauma and loss can be. Sarah has an amazing story that I know will inspire and empower all of you. Sarah has dealt with everything from heartbreak to depression to financial loss to suicide attempts. Sarah shares with me how her love for literature, writing, and the work of authors like Cormac McCarthy helped her to endure even as her life seemingly unraveled. You can watch Sarah’s YouTube channel called Love Letters from Sarah to learn more about her origin story. Her history is painful, but relatable. From being cheated on by her partner to losing her beautiful home and garden, Sarah has endured so much turmoil and heartbreak, but has come through with her soul and her purpose intact. After losing her relationship and all of those external things which made her feel strong and protected, Sarah had to turn within and find her own power and talent in order to survive. Sarah is living proof that there is nothing that we cannot live through, nothing that we are not strong enough to endure. And, most importantly, that our pain can often deepen our creative expression and our purpose here. Her story is truly poetically beautiful and inspiring, and I am so honored to have such a strong and powerful friend. She has taught me so much about how to live with appreciation and strength, even when it seems like everything has been taken away from you. If you have ever struggled with depression, loss, or thoughts of suicide, I urge you to listen to this episode and listen to how Sarah dealt with her pain and not only survived, but thrived. You can find Sarah's Youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2xtHp-0DTZ2fGFPLa4PswA Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love sex relationship

questions. And I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Our guest this week says grief, even the worst kind becomes creation through the stories we tell. And full disclosure, Sarah D. Little is an old friend of mine. Say hello, Sarah. Hi, everybody. I actually first got to know Sarah through a mutual dear friend of ours, and she was helping my oldest son, who's now 25. In particular, she wasn't really helping with college applications, But with his college essays and the way that you were able to coax, inspire, tickle, whatever it took, the expression out of him was really magical. And one of the things that's been apparent from as long as I've known you is what a beautiful and passionate writer you are.

But what I didn't know until more recently, which is what I really wanted to share with everyone today, is your backstory. I mean, Lord knows and everybody knows the kind of shitstorm I've lived through, at least over the past year. And we all have these AFGEs, as I call them, another fucking growth experience after another that break us open and break us apart. And what I am most interested in is not only helping to support people through those things, but as and more importantly, and this is where you come in, Sarah, is to help people understand that there's nothing we can't live through, survive, but more importantly, thrive through. And I think the vein of this that is so beautiful that I'm going to have you share with us in this episode of The Language of Love is the way in which creativity and for you in particular writing for someone else and maybe something else, but how that creative expression is fueled from that pain. So I'm really excited to talk to you about this. But first, if it's okay, I want to just share a little bit of what you call your origin story. Is that okay?

Yes, of course. the origin story for love letters or the origin story okay the origin story is that there's probably lots of origin stories so many there's so many origin story my goodness right all of them steeped in grief and nightmares and so it's so it's exciting to talk about each of them and then also as you say to talk about the ways in which i coped with all of these and made it through It didn't just make it through, but as you say, thrived into it through the act of creation. And for me, it was writing. And for other people, it will be other mediums.

But for me, it was the written word. And just so you know, Sarah has a YouTube channel called Love Letters from Sarah. And this is the origin story of that. Okay, so I'm just going to read parts of this. Derek was her long, long-term boyfriend, life partner. After Derek left me and I knew I was going to lose my house in Charlevoix, I sank into a terrifying abyss. One night I sat sobbing and screaming in my bedroom with a loaded gun pressed to my head.

My stomach sank when I read that, by the way. But I thought of the legacy of suicide that already marked my family. And I thought of my parents and the people who love me, and I couldn't hold the trigger. She goes on to talk about how the next morning she was numb, watching the birds out the window, And she suddenly thought of these images that passed through her mind from when she first read Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing more than 20 years ago. And she goes on to say that all these images were coming through, these collages of images, sentences, moments, and snippets as I wrote these things down.

I became filled with a pure sense of joy as if golden light suffused my body. Now, we're going to come back to that because this is one of the keys of the evolution of healing from grief is that there is a transcendence that comes as you start to tap into your healing. And then she goes on to say, in the following days that followed, she wrote a love letter. So this led her to write a love letter to Cormac McCarthy, because what had happened is you'd written, you started madly writing down all these things you could remember. Everything from every book he'd ever written that I had read, these images and thoughts and sentences and snippets. They'd all lodged themselves into my soul and into my heart

for my entire life. I mean, this man, these books and all the people to whom I wrote love letters, but they had raised me, forged me, formed me as much as my parents and my best friends had, even though I had never met them. They have raised me and altered my perspective of the world and myself and my place in the world through the works of genius that they had created. And those works of genius lived inside me forever. Which I think is so amazing because for someone like me who loves to read, and I like to write, but I don't write. I love to read creative novels and things like that, but I'm not a novel. I've never written a novel. I'm too scared to, but I have the worst memory. I can remember plots, but I cannot remember. But because this is something that

words and playing with words and the tree of words is something that is so fundamental to who you are. I just think so cool because that's what we remember, right? So because for Sarah, writing has always been such a huge part of who she is, of who you are, right? That it makes sense to me that you were remembering all of that and you wrote and then decided to film yourself reading love letter to Cormac McCarthy. Exactly. So I finished that first one for Cormac and all those word collages. And then I made them into sentences and then into paragraphs. And then that became my very first love letter. And I wandered around my freaking empty house by myself alone, sober, by the way, reading this love letter out loud to myself over and over and

over again. And I got giddy and euphoric. And I kept saying out loud, thank you, Cormac McCarthy. Thank you. Because the writing of and the reading of that love letter, it wasn't just a wild appreciation of Cormac McCarthy. It reminded me of the essence of who I was and what it was like then to write and to act and to speak from a pure place of love. The evening before, I had been steeped in utter anguish. I didn't want to be alive anymore. 12 hours. You had a gun to your head. I put a gun to my actual head. Have you ever done that before Sarah? I've never done that before. I have, I have lived most of my life with one foot in the abyss for sure. I've always many of us have, but to get to that point of despair, that is a serious dark night of the soul.

It was a serious dark night of the soul. And I had no belief that I would ever find my way out and that I would find my way out the very next morning because of Cormac McCarthy. I mean, come on. I love Cormac McCarthy. God bless him. But who thinks of him as a life savior? But it makes perfect sense. And not, you know, someone else. I think the thing I want to highlight for you listening to this is that, you know, first of all, it doesn't happen for everyone that the next day they have this epiphany, right? But there is a moment these angels are all around us, right? It might be a book reread or a person meet at the supermarket the next day, or a child we see playing in a park or like something starts to happen if we're open to that. Yes. And often

we're not open to that until we completely break open. Exactly. I mean, you've always been someone as long as I've known you who has been spiritually attuned and seeking joy and meaning and everything. And yes, like the rest of us, you have your demons and your struggles like we all do. But often it's that fucking growth experience. It's that horrible thing that happens that not only breaks us open and part of what happens, and I think this is really important to mention too, and you allude to this in your origin story, is that you have a legacy of suicide in your family, right? So I also feel when I read that, I just saw these women standing behind you as you had

that gun to your head, because I know that when you were 15, you had, tell us about what happened in your family. I shall. I wrote it down, in fact, to make sure that I didn't forget the two dates that my mother's sisters had killed themselves. So when I was 15, my mother's two younger sisters, Pat and Joy, shot and killed themselves within a month of each other. Joy shot herself on February 18th and Pat shot herself on March 11th. Oh, my gosh.

Their father, my grandfather, had sexually, physically and emotionally abused his daughters for years. my grandfather's brother had also committed suicide. And my grandfather's father died in an insane asylum in North Carolina. My mother has always contended with depression and anxiety. And I often joke that depression, despair, anxiety, anguish, all of these things have been my best friends and constant companions literally for as long as I can remember. So the history in my family feels like an incredibly dark legacy. And I sometimes think about it as a poison in my blood, that it's going to take me down, that one day it's going to claim me. But I don't think it's going to now. And it's interesting that it took, I lived through what happened when I was 15 and so did my mother. She and I are both survivors and we've both had incredible bouts with despair and we struggle with it daily, but we're both still here and we've both made communities and we both make

art and we both write and we both have love in our lives and friendships. And that feels like a profound win. That's a huge win. I mean, just the fact that your mother, much less you, survived this. And are you an only child? I am. Yeah. That's even harder in some ways.

because you're holding the generational trauma yourself. All of it. Like it all comes down to me. And it all comes down to you in that moment, holding a gun to your head. Exactly. At that moment, I was hopeless. Everything I loved was gone.

Derek was gone. The house was gone. Everything that I wanted and I thought that I had and had worked so hard for, I thought I would get to keep that and die in that house with the love of my life. When I was 97, I saw it so clearly in my mind. Yeah. I remember when you got that house, Charlevoix, Wisconsin, right?

Michigan. Michigan. I get them all confused. Okay. Charlevoix, Michigan. And it was like your dream house with the gardens and art installations and your partner of how many years? Nine years. Nine years. This guy that seemed like the sun and moon set on you. and he turned i mean we don't want to disparage him but he turned out to have been having a separate relationship and he left he left me he left me for a woman that i knew after having an affair with her and lying to me about it so there was that humiliation on top of humiliation on top

of everything else and you had to leave the house because you couldn't afford to keep it alone i couldn't afford to keep it alone and i also couldn't manage it alone yeah it was a four acre yard that we had landscaped into these glorious flower installations, beautiful walking paths. And I mean, that house was my comfort, my solace, my joy, my place of safety from the storm of the world and from the storm in my own mind. And it was just gone. That's such a metaphor because also, even though it was all of those things, it was outside of you.

Right. Exactly. All of it was an outside representation of everything that I thought that I loved and wanted. So the house and the grounds and Derek himself. I mean, all of it. The man in the white picket fence, sort of. Yes.

Damn it. I really wanted that, Laura. Really did. And then just in one fell swoop, just gone. And what I was left with then was that horrifying abyss and pure hopelessness because all the things outside of me that I did love but that I counted on to make me feel loved and worthy were all gone. And what saved me the next day, which I still can't quite get over that it happened so quickly, is everything that resided inside myself. All of those things inside of me saved me. All of

the works of literature and beauty that I had internalized through the years and that brought me so much strength, my own gratitude and appreciation for these things welled up from inside my own facility with writing. And I don't even want to call it facility. It's a facility. It's a gift. Passion, love for. And so the night before I wanted to take my life and the next day, because of Cormac McCarthy's freaking sentence, and then because of the love letter that I wrote as a result of that, and then because of all of the other love letters that I wrote as a result of that, and then because of the YouTube channel that I made as a result of that,

all of that was internally based. It all sprung from a wellspring inside of myself that I was actually unaware that I possessed at that point. And how would you describe that love spring? What did you discover was there that you didn't know was there before? Literally all the strength in the world, the strength and the golden light of love. I keep having emails that come in. I'm just going to ignore that and turn down the volume. um the golden light of celestial appreciation and gratitude i didn't realize lived inside of me but it does and it's made of strength it looks like gold and is made of steel and a profound desire to live lived inside of me which i was completely unaware of that previous

evening and the thing that made me access that full desire to live was by lauding appreciating and showing gratitude for the lives of others. So I took my gaze of anguish off myself and off everything that had fallen to ruin around me. And I turned that gaze instead inward and focused on the things that I was profoundly grateful for and then lauded those things loudly

and with great plea and euphoria. And then I made a YouTube channel dedicated to love and appreciation for these people. And because of that, I mean, okay. My life did not heal instantly, obviously. I mean, I still, I still have horrific nights of the soul where I'm just like, what the hell am I doing here? What am I doing with my life and who am I and who do I think I am and all of that. But the writing of those love letters, making of that YouTube channel and the accessing of all the internal strength that I had and the

ways in which I resonated with these divine works of art and the strength that that gave me, all of that coalesced in such a way as to remind me that that my life is worthy and beautiful if only for the resonance that my life has with the lives of others so that unity say that again say that again say that again my life is not worthy if only through the resonance um with the lives of others and with the beauty that they have created i'm not standing alone my ascension and my plummeting those are not mine alone they belong to all of us collectively we're all going through it and you're not alone right your solace and your support is not found in those beautiful gardens it's found in the garden inside you in the garden inside of me it turns out that it's cultivated and

seeded by all the beautiful geniuses of all the wonderful things you hold thank you beautiful geniuses yes and laura what you just said reminded me of a thing it's a little off topic but it's in my mind i want to just say it so for years my mother had a sign-off quote on her emails and it was be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a harder battle yeah and that is a wisdom born of anguish trade ice skating at nathan phillips square for ice cubes in your umbrella drink let porter airlines fly you from toronto pearson non-stop to 10 top sun destinations in mexico the caribbean and costa rica enjoy award-winning porter service toronto has loved for 20 years and start your vacation as soon as you're on the plane book your sunny getaway today at

flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy because you look at other people and you would you look at me and guess that i'm suffering profoundly ever oh no that's well god help social media is that on steroids, right? All gloss and veneer. And we spend so much of our time attempting to hide our tears, our anguish, our frailty, our quote unquote weaknesses. When in fact, if we would just share them and show them, then we would honor them, strengthen them, and then embrace like the grand collective of human anger, which isn't a weakness, it's a strength because it breeds collective compassion. It does. And you know, I, one of the teachers that I love so much is a Buddhist monk named Pema Chodron. She's really about death,

but also loss and grief. And she has all of these beautiful prayers. And so much of the fundamental basis of all of them is as you're in your pain and anguish or your loss or your sadness, part of the prayer is honoring and connecting to all the millions of others who in this very now moment are feeling what you feel and are in the same state of pain or anguish and that connection to humanity and our collective pain is not intended to wallow there with everyone as in misery loves company but in that you're not alone and there's so much beauty in that pain as well so much beauty in that shared anguish and that writing of that first Cormac McCarthy the writing that came to you first spoke to that, right?

I'm assuming that those quotes. Yes, can I read that quote out loud? Yeah, go ahead. I have it. So this is my favorite one. Like he's written a million books and they're all grand and glorious. This quote, this one always sticks with me.

The dog tottered away up the road in the rain on its stricken legs. And as it did, it howled again and again in its heart's despair until it was gone from all sight and all sound in the night's onset and if that's not human grief yeah holiness wandering off you know like crippling walk and right all of it in the rain and the strickenness and the crippledness and the disappearing into the night until you're gone from all sight and all sound feel seen and understood and yes and too yes and the thing that you were just talking

about really struck me and resonated. Can I say a thing that I often think about that's a little bit irreverent, but is related to the thing that you just said? So I know, I'm sure you're familiar with, there was a movement years ago, I can't remember when, when women would sort of strip down naked and then write words of strength on their bodies, like courage and strength. And I love that. That's great. That's amazing. That's not for me. That is not what I do. The thing that i've always wanted to do and the thing that i think would be much more interesting and much more collective and much more comforting for all of us would be to um cover ourselves in post-it notes on which we had written clearly and unapologetically all of the emotional maladies

that plague us so like i would be covered in post-it notes mine would say like insecurity generalized anxiety disorder depression despair existential dread catastrophist loves a good doom spiral given to shame spirals of self-loathing and emotional eating hashtag i like cake like all the things because it's not because i just think it would be such a lovely way for all of us to wear our shattered bits literally on our sleeves because we're so often taught to value only what is optimistic only what is successful only what is positive about ourselves and others but there's so much value in the darkest parts. Yeah. And that's really what is more to me, more aspirational. There's this movement going around a social media and only not many people

are doing it, but where they take pictures of the psychotropic meds they take, you know, so you see Prozac or Zoloft, you know, lithium or whatever, because it's about claiming how perfectly imperfect we are. One of the things that I love about what you're doing, and you write about this in your origin story of love letters, is you say that our world speaks so often of the language of division and hatred and petty critique, and my love letters are the language of gratitude, deep appreciation, and a testament to the power of words to unshatter the person who writes them and bring joy to the people who receive them. I think that's so beautiful.

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our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. Thank you, Laura. I want so much to grow this channel for that reason. I think about our world now, and I know it's very popular for everybody that lives in an era to say that their era is the absolute worst, but I think we can all agree that we're

living in an era of rabid division, warring factions, and insults are our common currency, and we snark at people for sport, and we tear each other down as a form of amusement. And I can't stand it one more second. I mean, the tagline of my channel is, because this world is too free with critique and too stingy with compliment. And I freaking mean that. And I think if you've been alive on the planet for more than eight minutes, you're viscerally aware that the world is too free with critique and too stingy to compliment. And what I'd like to do is use this channel as some sort of impetus to knit us together through appreciation and words of gratitude for other human beings and the glory that they have

made and the way that it has affected us and strengthened us and inspired us. You know what you should do? I'm just having, I love this idea so much, what you're doing, but I just had this thought that if you make a social media page for your, I don't know if If you have yet for, if you want to find these, go to love letters from Sarah on YouTube, her YouTube channel, but you should make, uh, you know, a social media page for love letters from Sarah and let people post their own love letters too. Wouldn't that be good? Like let everybody post their love letters.

That's exactly what I want. I wrote this long plea in, um, in, in the letter that I, that I sent to you about what I want this movement to be. And it's actually incredibly hilarious that I would want to start a social media movement, a global social media movement, because I'm not on social media. I'm not on it. I'm going to have to learn that the thing that I envision and the thing that I want so much would be something very much like that. I mean, I want every living human being on the earth, specifically now, as COVID is still around, waning, but not gone, as Ukraine is defending itself against the onslaught of a freaking despot. I mean, I want all of us, if we can, to write love letters in praise of some human being who has touched our life and enriched it. And I also said in that letter, I mean, post them on YouTube, do it on Instagram, do it on Twitter. Yeah, leave them a comment on your channel. Yes, please. Like just all of it.

And I also, it's really important to me that people know because writing is not everybody's medium, as you said before. So some people will not garner the sense of elation and pure collective oneness that I get from writing. So a love letter need not be a letter at all. A love letter can be an act of generosity. It can be an act of pure kindness.

It can be a random act of kindness. It can be a work of art. It can be literally anything. If you're an artist, paint a painting, do a mural, create an installation, plant a flower, plant a tree. If you're a street artist, paint an entire blank alleyway with the language of love and with words of appreciation. I just made a fairy house out of, as an act of gratitude. I just made a fairy house. I support this action. I support this fully. I absolutely do. Feeling deep longing and appreciation for the one in me who used to see the fairies and for the fairies who are still there,

but I haven't seen for 25, 35 years, 45 something years. so um so in an act to invite them back and also to express gratitude and also to connect to that part of me i made a house did you make them a house yes i think it's all covered in moss and very cute i'll send you now please send me a picture and now that you've made them a house they're definitely going to show up they're there i just haven't seen them but now i'm going to see them i'm going to see them they're going to be in the house and the same like the same thing holds true. So you make the physical structure and then the ethereal beings come. So I want to build the physical structure with some sort of social media thing, which I don't know anything about, but I

see it happening. And in the meantime, if anyone's listening and wants to help Sarah, let her know, but they should all go to your YouTube channel. It's called Love Letters from Sarah. But also, I want to talk for a second and get your wisdom because as you were saying, forever, you know, coming, like reaching into yourself during that darkness and that loss and that sadness, what would you say is like the first step? And it's not necessarily going to happen the next day or the next day. What's important to know is that it does get better, A. And B, what would be the first step to tapping into, because fundamentally what we're tapping into is the immense well of human gratitude, not necessarily of like, I'm grateful because I have a car.

And it's like, how would you describe the kind of gratitude that you're going for? I'm going to backtrack just a little bit and I'm going to answer this and I'm going to answer it by prefacing it with these statements. I want to say to everyone that we share sorrow as much as we share joy. We share grief and loss as much as we share abundance. We share dread and fear and shame as much as we share sunny outlooks and healthy self-esteem. That anguish, amen sister, that anguish is worthy of being felt without the cruelty of someone attempting to force a silver lining on you before you're ready to hear it or feel it. All right, wait, stop there. That's super important because what we're talking about with gratitude is not like oh you know think on

the bright side right silver lining and oh my god i want to murder people that say that to people who are going through anguish i literally want to throttle them and i wrote about that i'll just continue reading just deep that like forcing somebody into a freaking silver lining before they're ready that's just toxic positivity and that is mean spirited it belittles people's pain by characterizing it as weak or unworthy, as if the silver lining and the sunny character-building lessons of pain were somehow more important, more acceptable than the pain itself. I freaking reject this notion utterly. Like, silver linings have their place. Of course, they do. But pain, humiliation, loss, grief, and every other difficult aspect of being alive deserves to be fully felt

and fully honored and only then can it be used as a place of connection with others a connection that makes of our darkness light we are all so tender so feeling so ready for tears for love for connection and the most loving thing we can do is to share our tears and our sadness and the very things we try so valiantly to hide because by sharing them we normalize them and by normalizing them, we honor them. And by honoring them, we can make from sadness and vulnerability and shame something collectively soothing, something beautiful, something compassionate for all of us to hang on to. That's my rant. Beautiful. Yes. Share, memorize, honor, and then comes the soothing, right? And then comes the soothing, but you can't go directly from the shattering and the

anguish to the golden glory of ascension through creation. I mean, it happened to me once that I was utterly shattered and put a gun to my head. And the next day, Cormac McCarthy's sentence, birth, this entire movement, hashtag love letters, that happened once where my shattering and my mending happened within the space of 13 hours. That has not been true for the bulk of my life. that when my mom's family was shattered when I was 15 and I became shattered as a result of their shattering, I didn't get okay. And I still wasn't okay, but I didn't get even remotely okay until I was 27. And in those intervening years, grief, loss, shame, self-loathing, self-hatred, you name it, every dark poison filled me to the brim. It silenced me. It made me want to die

all the time. All I wanted to do was I hide in a corner and weep and apologize for my very existence. And the thing that eventually got me out of that was the writing of the novel. But that recovery was incredibly long. And the recovery from Derek leaving and the house in Charlevoix and all of that implosion, that was incredibly fast. I think that's for a couple of reasons, because I've found the same is true in my life, that the more things you recover from, The quicker the recovery goes, if you adequately recover, if you really do the work to recover, then the next time it's easier because your system and your emotional life and your energetic system knows what to do. But I also think it's the times we're in that just energetically, we are all being called to rise. And so if you are willing to surrender to the pain and let yourself break open, then I think you are supported more than ever before on an energetic level, on a metaphysical, physical level, if not a practical one, to rise and to heal. I completely agree. The thing that has been the most healing for me in all of the aspects of life, whereby I found myself literally undone, the thing that let me heal the best was absolute acceptance of the horrificness that was happening and to allow myself to simply feel it, to be sober, not to try and smoke it away with weed or drink it away with whiskey or watch 70s.

Or positive think it away. don't even get me started ah singing happy songs and trying to find the silver lining i won't do it damn it can't make me do it but you have to accept it and feel it and honor it and first and not hide it you can't hide it no you can't magically transform it into something that is strengthening before it is actually time for it to become strengthening you can't fake it you can't falsify it you have to go through it and be in the belly of that beast until you literally want to rip the skin off your body because it's so painful you can't stand it for one more second but if you get in there and if you live with it if you can tolerate it if you can face it down

and be with that particular demon in a weird way then what has happened to me through the years with depression is like my demon is that when I'm alone with it in the arena it is now so familiar to me it's become my friend I'm not terrified of it I'm like hi hi darkness hi despair hello anguish. Exactly. I mean, it's like that. And I'm not minimizing depression or anguish. It's real and it's paralyzing. It can be, but it can also be weirdly instructive. Yes. And it can be enlightening. What I find is by going into the pain, A, it doesn't take you over forever, right? It is a wash and an intensity and a tsunami wave rolling over you or through you or however you want to describe it. But then there's the release and you feel lighter and

clearer. And I think that's when you are open to the soothing, I think, and the creative expression and the appreciation. And that is only one. Exactly. That is only one. That's so funny. it's like we're sharing the same brain. Can I read you this thing that I wrote? I wanted to share it. And I shared it instead. And then you shared it instead. I will share it again because I think it's just so important. So what you just said is what I'm about to say in a slightly different way, which is that when I stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back at me and it has my entire life, I can simply say to it, hello, I am grateful for the darkness and the light. The darkness informs the light and the light informs the darkness. And I wouldn't trade

either my despair or my euphoria because they have both forged me. They've made me able to create the things I create. And they've allowed me, most importantly, to look at every human I meet with eyes of compassion because I see my own struggles in their struggles and I see their struggles in my struggles. And to take it back to the love letters for just a second, when I'm writing and recording these things, and I haven't done one in a year, by the way, which is, I've been remiss, but these moves have really taken it out of me. But when I'm writing and recording these love letters that express my pure, unadulterated gratitude for the people who have brought depth and aching beauty and resonance to my life, I am filled with euphoria. My cup

runneth over, and I am reminded with every word that the ways in which we love, support, and inspire each other is the purest expression of divinity I have ever known. And you don't get that light without the darkness. Oh, you can't even perceive light without the darkness. And so I used to be really terrified of my high push. I mean, when I was 15, 16, 17, 18, and I would go to these places, I would do anything to get out of them. Oh God, anything, literally anything. I I mean, I could eat like 17 hostess cupcakes in a row and some whiskey chasers and then you name it, like every bad behavior. I did it because it was so freaking painful.

You can't tolerate it, but you can, in fact, tolerate it if you sit with it long enough and if you become familiar. But what you can't tolerate is the fear of tolerating it. That's what it is. And that's what took me a long time to understand. You think you can't tolerate the pain, but what you really can't tolerate is the fear that you can't tolerate it. the pain. Shades of meaning, but you can, you absolutely can. And you know this more than

anybody. Yes. And you've been holding my hand through a lot of it. And I'm so grateful that you are on the planet and that you're spreading the love and that you're modeling a way to turn darkness into light, but to see the light through the darkness, I would say even more so and to access the light that's always there. Any final words? I would definitely encourage you go to the YouTube channel, Love Letters from Sarah, leave your own love letter in the comments. She's going to make some social media pages, whether she wants to or not. To start my social media empire and to start my global movement, apparently I'm going to have to get involved in some social media evidently you do my evidently i'm gonna have to do that but in the meantime if any human

on the earth wants to watch a few love letters and get inspired to write their own or to make their own brand of love letter be it an action or a house that they build and give away for free share what you've done what your love letter has been an act of grace it really is grace that's what it absolutely is grace and generosity and love and deep gratitude and appreciation for all of humanity so any way in which that becomes manifest just put it on social media after you go into your pain yes first you have to befriend your pain because it's real familiar and real comfortable with your anguish you just gotta like the grace comes and then the grace and the goldenness and the euphoria and the creation can come but only only after you stepped into it and

torn the skin off your body stop saying that it's not bad the skin is still there i promise we'll call it a sloughing of dead skin a sloughing of dead skin so that we can a very harsh thank you thank you thank you my thank you for joining and let us know what your thoughts are what were you going to say you were about to say something sorry let me say that again thank you thank you thank you for all that you've been doing and all that you are my love we really appreciate it love letters yeah i love you lady and i'm so profoundly grateful to have had this time with you and just for your love and support it means the absolute world to me the absolute world I went to the doctor

Said I'm crazy for your love Wrote me a prescription But there's no cure for a crush All I wanna do, I wanna do is