Love, Reimagined.

There’s a moment in every healing journey when you realize that trying to grow in isolation only makes the ache louder. For me, that moment came after reading All About Love by bell hooks.

In it, she writes that “love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” That line changed me. It revealed how lovelessness had been showing up all over my relationships, in my work, and even in my social anxiety. I started to understand that love is not something we stumble into. Love is an act. A skill. A daily practice that we can grow. And that sparked a fire within me (if you're an artist I'm sure you can relate).

But I also realized something else: I didn’t want to heal in isolation anymore. Trying to fix myself alone was only making me sicker. I needed community. I needed to be witnessed—and to witness others doing the same. So, I reached out and asked if anyone wanted to talk to me about love. I thought maybe they would be too busy or disinterested. But every single person was ready to hit the ground running. I thought we would throw a few poems together and then in a month or so, have a live performance. It turned into a symbolic 9-month experience of group therapy sessions, one on ones, through three seasons of life, we showed up for each other again and again.

That small, tender outreach became the seed for what would grow into Love Reimagined, a community exploration of love, performance, and collective healing.

We started with nothing but curiosity. No script. No clear outcome. Just the desire to understand what love could look like when practiced in real time, with real people. Together, we learned to love ourselves in the way we showed up for each other. To visualize. To transmute. To transcend. To build new realities in our art and in our lives.

We learned how to use lighting grids and projector screens. How to give ourselves grace. How to sing together, combine poetry and prose, and tell our stories. Some of us stepped into the spotlight for the first time ever; others stepped back into it after a long while away. Through it all, we grew our capacity to love—ourselves, each other, and the process.

As the months went on, I saw how commitment itself is a love language. Our troupe pushed through winter’s gray days, heartbreaks in the spring, and a summer full of change and big feelings...all for this shared dream. That's what I want to see happen more and more.

When it came time to share Love Reimagined with the world, I didn’t want it to be a traditional show. I wanted it to be immersive and therapeutic; a living experience where everyone could practice love together. Audience members wrote affirmations, witnessed the performers’ vulnerability, and had the chance to test out their own vulnerability in a safe space. We normalized feeling in public. Whew, scary huh?

And through it all, one lyric kept circling in my mind—from one of my favorite songs, “Come Close” by Common:

“Come close to me, baby, let your love hold you. I know this world gets crazy—what’s it without you?”

That line became the heartbeat of the project. Because Love Reimagined was exactly that: an invitation to come closer—to ourselves, to each other, and to the world we’re trying to heal. To remember that even in the chaos, connection is what saves us. I have always felt like a weirdo for wanting to feel things with other people. Always wanting a group, a family to talk with and share with. I was at times, made to feel needy or not individualistic enough. There were times I felt maybe it was driven by a lack of confidence, when in reality, I am operating in just the way I should be: with collective love at the center of everything I do. Loving on my collective is the way I love on myself, and that is valid and that is needed in the world more and more.

When people came up after to say, “I needed this,” I knew we had all touched something sacred.

Because real healing doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens in community, in the brave act of extending yourself—just as bell hooks wrote—for the growth of yourself or another.

To everyone who created, attended, or shared a piece of their heart: thank you. Love Reimagined taught me that when we choose love, we step into infinite possibility. Thanks for extending yourselves for my growth. I will always return the favor.

Peace,

The World Is Yours, Always.