Yes, love can be difficult. Connecting to other people is frequently difficult work.

Still, it shouldn’t feel like working a nine to five shift, eight days a week, coming home and collapsing into bed without brushing your teeth, scrolling through your phone until morning.

It’s more like braiding garlic. You have to be able to sit still, keep your hands steady, concentrate on the pattern, notice the details, keep going when a sharp edge knicks the corner of your thumb.

Making something beautiful takes effort and patience and time, and also – none of those things have to be unpleasant. If they are, it is okay to stop – maybe not even forever, either, just for a while. Setting things down for a minute when you’re tired doesn’t mean you’ll never come back.

It’s like knitting, or working through a difficult math problem, or learning the words to a song, or making hot cocoa, or writing a story.

Sometimes you drop a stitch off a needle, drop a negative sign somewhere as you’re solving for unknowns in an equation. Sometimes you get the words wrong or sing off key or don’t know what happens next, or you do know what happens next but you don’t know how to say it. Sometimes you burn the cocoa, or it boils over and spills out all over the stove.

But you practice, and you learn how, and eventually you don’t have to think about it as much as you used to.

Each song, each recipe, each piece, each problem, each story teaches you something, changes you a little, gives you something to think about.

And you end up with something pretty lovely to show for your troubles, in the end.

So take your time. Don’t force it.

Have fun.