Happy birthday bud! I wonder how you feel reading that headline right now. But let's get into the letter.

We've been dating for a while now and I think I know you pretty well. The way you convert your fear into anger — as if you think that if you could just punch the darkness hard enough that it would turn back into daylight. The way that when waitstaff clears our table at restaurants there's always just a little bit more food on your side of the table than mine. The way that when I make my bloop bloop bleep nonsense sounds that you so readily accept all the parts that make up me. So for this birthday letter I want to do something a little different and present my Grand Unified Theory of Sarah And Why She Is Special And Deserves Love TM Copyright 2022 all rights reserved.

First let's go over a number of facts that I've learnt about you throughout our relationship. This is going to feel like a bit of a roast but don't worry. I'll tie up all the loose ends by the end.

Fact the first: you constantly read company mission statements. Honestly this is so strange to me. Before I met you I truly believed that NOBODY read those statements. I was fully convinced that companies put those out just for fun, because I couldn't imagine somebody reading them and genuinely believing them. And now here I am, dating somebody who not only reads them but actively chooses companies based on them. Wild.

Fact the second: you read a sentence printed on a t-shirt like, "if you want to fly, give up everything that weights you down", and your first thought isn't, "wow what a load of crock can I get this shirt without that quote on it". In fact I think you might like the shirt more because of that line. Completely unfathomable.

Fact the third: you travel to foreign countries — countries that you will eventually leave — and put all your efforts into connecting with people you may very well never see again. This is the most telling sign of who you are by far, and the one that most confused me when I first met you.

My therapist recently asked me what attracted me to you, and I told her that I was actually super confused by you when I first met you.

She looked concerned and asked, "but in a good way?".

"Yeah! In a good way."

I was confused by you because you lived life so differently than I did. I remember being in Taiwan, asking you why you liked travel so much. You said it was the people. I wondered to myself, what is it about meeting people that was so special. That it would be worth the effort to meet them, knowing you would leave.

Above all, I couldn't understand how you were able to put your connections to people at the center of your life. You see, I had spent my entire life putting those connections as far away from me as possible. Years of being alone, pretending to sleep, and minimizing myself had taught me that the most painless existence was one spent as far away from the things that could hurt me as possible.

So imagine my confusion when the world plops down this girl in front of me, who decided to love people with her whole being despite the near certainty that some of those people will leave her. And she does it with just the sheer force of will of her own hope and optimism. But recently I've realized, that's just it. All these differences between us where I see naivety, you see hope.

Your love for company mission statements, for cheesy t-shirt slogans, for song lyrics we disagree on, for tiktoks with slowly panning scenery and overlaid self-help quotes. And your love for people. They all lead back to your ability to hope. I know you've always said that you work hard to act with hope and not fear, but I've never known how much you embodied this value until I saw it in every aspect of your life.

And I want you to appreciate how amazing this trait of yours is. Everytime somebody looks taken aback by the genuineness of your interest, it's because we don't usually meet people with the ability to hope for connection the way that you can. I imagine all the people you meet having the same experience that I did, regarding you with a mix of confusion and amazement, that in a world of people too skeptical to hope for genuine connection there's this girl running about, full of hope and earnest interest, asking people to play this strange new card game she found about opening up with your deepest vulnerabilities.

I think you're dying from boredom upstairs as I'm writing this, so I'll wrap this up. From the first time I met you, I've known that you lived in a very different way than I did. But I also faintly knew that I wanted to live the way you did. With hope. We talked before about how in a good relationship partners learn from each other, and from the first time I met you I've been learning about the hope that pours out from every part of who you are. I love you, and I admire you more every day that I learn more about you.