You must send Valentines. I’ll tell you why below, but first I have to admit I always disliked Valentines Day.

And then last 2020 – 5 years into a single life I hadn’t planned on – I gave it up. Instead of hating Valentines Day, I challenged myself to send Video Valentines to the people I love. And since I can easily fall prey to ‘project creep’ I made a blueprint to keep it simple, heartfelt, and personal.

I sent them to my friends & family – a different one to each person. One of those people was Sylvia – the woman who’d become my impromptu foster mother when I left home at 16. I got to put all my love for Sylvia in one tiny package I knew she’d receive. This was what I sent, and I haven’t shared it with anyone else until now.

But I could not get to send Sylvia another Valentine in 2021 because she died of COVID-19 a few days before February.

I’m heartbroken and nothing, nothing, nothing will ever replace the sound of her voice, the touch of her hand, the smell of her hair and the love I felt every time I was near her in any way.

We talked a lot in the year before her passing about love, about loneliness, about politics and what things were like long ago – the story of how she’d met her husband Leo, the sound of celebration the day WWII was over. I’ll never get to have those conversations again. And nothing can replace them.

But I KNOW she knows I love her. Because I told her. And knowing that she had no doubt of that means so much to me.

It feels vulnerable to share something this personal on the internet but I’m doing it because I want to show how ESSENTIAL it is for us to express the love we have.

So use the excuse of Valentine’s Day. Use whatever you can, whatever you have, whoever you are – to tell the people you love that you love them, in the most authentic, direct, personal way you can.

If you need a little support, come join the “20 Seconds of Love” trainings or register for the “Video Greeting Card” class I created to make it easier for people to make these little videos and get them to the people they love.

Because you MUST send Valentines – and I hope they’ll be tiny, bite-sized Video Valentines that tell the people you love just how much you love them. In your own loving words.

This blog was previously published on Feb. 4, 2021.

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