I’ll never forget the day I wrote a line to this effect in a journal…

He’s like the air I breathe.

Firstly, yes. I wrote this. About a real human boy, who I liked at the time.

Secondly, I wrote this when I was in high school. I say this so that hopefully we can all forgive teenage Erin for having a moment of hormonal insanity.

Finally, I don’t want the fact that I was a teenage girl writing in a moment of hormonal insanity to be an excuse for the very fact that I wrote it. I say this because I believe the line is an interesting and revealing comment on the matter of fulfilment.

As a matter of curiosity I typed ‘famous love songs’ into Google. I clicked on the first link that directed me to Billboard’s 50 Best Love Songs. I began to look up the lyrics to these songs. My head began to swim with lines like:

My love, there’s only you in my life, the only thing that’s bright. My first love, you’re every breath that I take, you’re every step I make.

I’m everything I am because you loved me.

[I’m] losing my mind, from this hollow in my heart. Suddenly I’m so incomplete.

That’s only three examples from a list of 50. It’s also only three examples from the thousands of other love songs that are out there. I thought to myself, ‘Wow! These words are constantly on repeat, playing quietly in the background, being absorbed into our subconscious!’

We hear these sentiments, not just in songs, but in so many popular films and television shows. A person falls in love, they fall to pieces when the relationship falters and those pieces are only put back together when the couple reunite or another relationship commences.

I thought of all the other examples where I have found those sentiments – in books, in advertising, even in the true stories of the successful couples around me.

I hastily came to the conclusion that society presents us with this invasive idea that being in a loving, romantic relationship will be the only thing that makes you whole.

I was armed and ready. Ready to present my view as black and white. The good vs the evil. The lie against the truth. I was ready to take to the keyboard with all the righteous indignation I could muster.

In fact, I did.

I wrote and rewrote for days, trying to perfect my declaration that you complete you, not someone else. But the more I thought about the topic the more I realised that my black and white view came from a place of anger.

It was anger that came as I mourned for the days I have spent wishing my life away, because it all felt meaningless without ‘someone’. It came as I grieved for the time I have spent ‘self-improving,’ in order for someone else to love me. It came as I remembered the whispers of self-doubt that have infected my mind, telling me I’m not beautiful enough, or smart enough, or talented enough.

It was then that I realised that the enemy of being whole wasn’t someone else.

It was me. 

The lie in question, that someone else completes us, is really a projection of something deeper. At the heart of it, we are told to look at ourselves. Focus on self and find the problem. Focus on your wants, your desires, your needs.

This discovery astounded me. I realised that fulfilment really was found with others. But not in the way I had so long believed and so recently scorned.

So now, if I could say something to my teenage self, I would say this:

Don’t rely on a boy or anyone else to be the air you breathe. Don’t even rely on yourself to be the air you breathe. Look around you. Who do you see? Think of them first. Start to serve and you will learn how to breathe.