Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy and Connection

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When did the concept of chosen family become part of your life, and how do you nurture those bonds? Remember that you are ultimately in control. At the end of the day, your preferences about love and relationships are your own. Just because you see many of your friends and family in relationships doesn’t mean that you’re ready for one. Assess whether you truly have a fear of love or are just simply not ready for a relationship. One is an unhealthy phobia and the other is a decision made out of maturity. Be Not Afraid of Love is a stunning collection of interconnected essays and affirmations that follow Mimi Zhu’s journey toward embodying and re-learning love after a violent relationship. You write a lot about healing and trauma and especially grief, both online and in the book. How do you think we should be navigating the kind of on-going grief we’re all processing, seemingly all the time?

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 source Serene, tender, and powerful. In this essay collection, Mimi Zhu reflects on their healing journey as a survivor of intimate partner violence. I liked their honesty about the pain of their abusive relationship and the wide range of emotions they experienced after it. They share many avenues and resources they used for healing, including individual therapy, group therapy, living in a rad group home, attuning themselves toward their body, and connecting with their ancestry and the wisdom of their elders. Their path toward healing wasn’t linear and it took work. They reference several feminist and social justice-oriented texts in this collection, including writings by bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Ling Ma, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Mia Mingus. I cherished and resonated with a few of their insights in particular, such as not conflating the presence of passion in a relationship with actual healthy communication and behavior, learning to prioritize friendship and alternative forms of community over heteronormative monogamous romance, and engaging in mindfulness and appreciation of simple beautiful things throughout one’s day. 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. Aggressive, passive-aggressive , or passive methods will not work. If you go to them, they will reject you. If you wait for them to come to you, then you will wait forever. Understand that you only have one weapon, the heart. There is a hole in their heart that needs to be filled. It is human nature.Do not force yourself to like things to get their attention. It will also raise alarms if you are “too perfect.” Limit your time alone together A collection of powerful interconnected essays and affirmations that follow Mimi Zhu’s journey toward embodying and re-learning love after a violent romantic relationship, a stunning and provocative book that will guide and inspire readers to lean into love with softness

A radical and revolutionary act of love, transcendently written. Mimi Zhu writes about love in a way that is tender and caring and healing—they contextualize love not as an abstract sentiment but as a grounded and spiritual act intimately tied to every aspect of what we fight for.” If you want to have a relationship with such a person, you will have to break through their defense. It is not an easy task, and it will test your patience to the limit. People who are afraid of love were most likely betrayed by their ex. One of the ways that betrayal manifested is through lies. It follows that they will detest lies and liars.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. The funeral for our relationship helped me to express all my complicated emotions in an alleviating synthesis. In that moment, I no longer compartmentalized my feelings in binaries of good or bad. I stopped chasing utopias and allowed myself to steep in the depths of my grief. I let all the nuanced feelings that were held in both/and to come together and coexist. I finally gave myself permission to miss him as all the joyful, loving, painful, and violent memories played out before me. I wept and sobbed and lamented out loud, sending the lost soul of our love affair to the afterlife. Grieving my life without him meant that I had to usher in a new life. The ceremony simultaneously honored the death of our relationship and celebrated a new mysterious beginning that awaited me. 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. 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.” Radical and revolutionary.”–Jonny Sun, New York Times bestselling author of Goodbye, Again A collection of powerful interconnected essays and affirmations that follow Mimi Zhu’s journey toward embodying and re-learning love after a violent romantic relationship, a stunning and provocative book that will guide and inspire readers to lean into love with softness In their early twenties, Mimi Zhu was a survivor of intimate-partner abuse. This left them broken, in search of healing and ways to re-learn love. This work is a testament to the strength and adaptability all humans possess, a tribute to love. Be Not Afraid of Love explores the intersections of love and fear in self-esteem, friendship, family dynamics, and romantic relationships, and extends out to its effects on society and the greater political realm. In sharing their own intimate encounters with oppression, healing, joy, and community, Mimi invites readers to reflect deeply on their own experiences as well, with the intention of acting as a guide to undoing the hurt or uncertainty within them. In this heartrending and revolutionary book, Mimi reminds us, be not afraid of love. Be Not Afraid of Love: Lessons on Fear, Intimacy, and Connection by Mimi Zhu – eBook Details Fear of Commitment Maybe the idea of being committed to one person for the rest of your life is terrifying to you, so you don’t allow yourself to get too attached. 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 At least at the start, if you can go out with your friends that will be better. The more people present, the less likely their brain will process it as a legitimate date.Talking 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. Without any institutional support, the 27-year-old has forged their own success by using their writing and art for self-reflection, building community, and healing. 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.