This is not at all the post I intended when I sat down to write this morning. It can keep.

As I went in search of a link for a quote I wanted to share in my original post, I stumbled upon writer, Andrew Solomon’s, TEDMED 2013 talk:  Love, No Matter What.

Given that Love is Always the Answer is one of my beliefs, I could not resist clicking on the title of his talk.

Andrew begins his talk with these words,

“Even in purely non-religious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality — a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness.” That’s from Time magazine in 1966.

Later, he quotes an article in The Atlantic Monthly, voice of liberal America — written by an important bioethicist who, in 1968, on the subject of Down syndrome children, said to millions of Americans,

“There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. It is sad, yes — dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down’s is not a person.”

I read Andrew’s first book, The Noonday Devil: An atlas of depression, a year after it was released in 2001. I was in the dark, dark, days of a relationship going very, very wrong. I knew I was in a depression. I didn’t know how to ‘get out of it’ and was searching for answers outside myself.  The answer to my depression was not ‘out there’. It was within me all along. It came from accepting I was not in a relationship of love gone wrong. I was in an abusive situation. It came from accepting I was abused. I did things I wasn’t proud, and I was still worthy of love. It came from acceptance of me, just the way I was, in all my warts, with all my Beauty and the Beast complexities. In acceptance, Love had room to flow. In Love, all things were possible, including loving myself even when I didn’t think I deserved it.

After devouring every word of his 20 minute TEDMED talk, I intend on reading his latest book, Far From The Tree.

Don’t tell anyone…. I’m hoping for rain this weekend so I can curl up and read!

Give yourself the gift of 20 minutes of enlightenment this morning with Andrew Solomon.