What turns me on.

Earlier this week, Megan wrote about passion. She wanted to know:

What’s got you fired up right now? What turns you on? What are you feeling passionate about?

Usually people use things that they are passionate about to fuel their love of themselves and of their significant other. What really gets me fired up, though, is love itself. Loving someone turns me on. It brightens my world. It makes me passionate about everything. It’s like there’s a light switch inside of me. I only really shine when I’m in love. I’ve felt like this my whole life, but it’s only really now, with SC, that every one else is seeing what I’ve been feeling all these years. They tell me I’m shining. They tell me I’m on fire. But I’m only in love.

With My First, I became passionate about soccer and about sex. But I was insecure and young and he was a liar who always told me grand stories. I believed him.

With The Ex, I became passionate about school and really living life to the fullest. But that was a roller coaster. One day I was shining with the possibilities of life and the next I was hitting my lowest of low gray, dull days.

When I really had time to fall in love with myself I became passionate about reading and painting and photography and expressing myself in ways I never knew were possible. I expressed myself in all of the ways until I exhausted my passions. 

Now, with SC, I’m passionate about life, but in a realistic way. Much more down to earth and less fairytale. Much more about me and him than about every one else’s opinions. I’m passionate about sleeping next to him each night and scratching his back the way he likes it and thinking of a new question to ask him each night before bed so that we’re always learning something about each other.

What really lights my fire are the little things. The times when we’re watching a movie and there’s a perfect line about loving someone, and he just lightly squeezes my hand right as I’m thinking, “that’s exactly how I feel.” Or when I tell him that I feel like I have a knot in my chest that I just need to cry out but I can’t because I don’t want him to see me like that. And I tell him about how I need to barricade myself in my blankets so the world can’t get to me when I’m so vulnerable. But he just ignores all that and holds me and tells me to cry. And I do. These are the things that I look forward to in life. Support, security, knowledge, comfort, an unspoken connection. These are the things that get me fired up. It’s how I know that this is right.