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#121: When you love someone
Shem Opolot
May 16, 2025
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Who am I? I’m Shem Opolot, a health professional turned content creator, passionate about helping people be their best selves in life and work.
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HAPPY FRIDAY 🎉 How was your week? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Oh. Okay. Really? Yeah? That’s crazy! Well, mine was…well, I’ve had better. Thanks for asking.
For those of you who read these within the first hour or so of them dropping, this might be later than usual. I’ve just returned from gluttonous overindulgence at my Thai classmate’s home to celebrate my class completing our comprehensive exams. Normally, the amount of food I consumed would indicate poor home training, but today, the way to an Asian mother’s heart is to eat ALL her food. And ask for some to go.
I didn’t disappoint. You’d be proud of me.
LIFE.
When you love someone.
I listened to this song, got into my feelings, and wrote this.
On a humid Wednesday night in Lakeland, Florida, in 2012, my Turkish German friend Yücel and I had work the next morning.
Florida was terribly humid, man. No amount of positive PR and Disney World can make up for it, in my opinion. I think it’s a crime to be born in an area that basically straddles the Equator, be hardened by it, darkened by it, and live there all your life…only to experience a heat stroke in America.
They should’ve put that information in the visa application paperwork. In fact, I should’ve been on the offensive at the embassy, finger-wagging and pressing the rude old lady behind the counter, who took X-rays of my financial statements, about what they planned to do about that perpetual sauna of a place. The visa should come with a portable fan, at least.
Anyway.
Yücel and I were roommates. That night, we got a call from our 6’4 Latvian friend, who looked half as impressive as you’re imagining. Picture Thor, but with student loans. The Latvian had the biggest heart and the heaviest right foot when seated in the driver’s seat of his white, juiced-up Volkswagen sedan.
The Latvian arrived shortly after his call and told us we were heading to Miami to party with some Russians. Miami was about 4 hours away from our residence hall—to give you a sense of the magnitude of this bad decision.
The Latvian was the best driver I’d ever met, but Yücel and I sat in the backseat and prayed to our respective gods. Well, I prayed to Jesus, while Yücel, an atheist, twiddled his thumbs, I suppose. Occasionally we reminded the Latvian—to no avail—that we were on student visas. One unfortunate traffic stop and we’d be on cargo planes back to our home countries, next to the boxed Shein outfit you ordered that will never arrive.
The Latvian drove us to Miami like a 21-year-old whose crush had promised them sex. He got our consent on the way. In the club, we met several Eastern Europeans who probably plied their trade in various crime syndicates. I was the only Black guy there and, save for Yücel—also the shortest. Yücel was born in civil war-riddled Turkey. They didn’t feed him well as a child. He was handsome with brown skin, a full beard, and a full head of hair. A solid 9 everywhere on the planet except when going through security in U.S. airports. God can’t give you everything.
After a couple of hours of oonts oonts music and vodka shots, the night culminated with us in the parking lot preparing to fight a team of Russians.
But this post is not about the fight, so keep your pants on.
In that moment, Yücel showed me the kind of friend he was for the millionth time. In his thick, a little bit Turkish and a little bit German accent, because Hitler had Europe on the ropes there for a while, he yelled (verbatim): “Guys, I don’t have visa. We are in America, and I can’t get arrested. But I love you guys, so if we fight, I fight with you. We figure the rest out later.”
If you’ve met Yücel, you know he meant every word.
Thankfully, the Latvian used the extra inches he had on everyone in there to smuggle us into his car, and we sped off back to Lakeland. In the car, in between Hail Marys, we praised him for rescuing us for about 10 minutes before we realized he was the one who took us there in the first place. We laughed.
Yücel and I had work in the morning.
If you were visiting a country Yücel was living in, and I told him you were my friend, Yücel would treat you like his family. You would hardly spend a cent. He’d take you under his wing and ensure you want for nothing. My atheist brother made me a better Christian than any sermon ever did.
***
The other day a friend of mine was talking about what a privilege it is to love and to be loved. And I told him, at my small age, I feel more grateful to love than to be loved.
You see, as Descartes said, the only thing you can truly be confident about is yourself. You could be hallucinating everything else. Worse, you could be numb to everything around you. Indifferent to people who are kind to you or mean to you.
I like the fact that, for whatever reason, I choose to care about certain people. I choose to be vulnerable before them and love them, whether or not they return it.
That’s how I aspire to practice friendship and love. No half-measures. Many double texts. Many unreturned visits. When we fight, I don’t wait for the other person to cave; I say sorry so we can skip right back into the good times. Even though I know the good times are a moratorium until the bad times return.
People say there’s no greater feeling than to love and be loved, but I feel so privileged to just love.
THINGS.
An excerpt.
A C.S. Lewis banger!
A picture.
Everyone is on board with Project Mbappe except Zion. Zion is on Project Zion. But we shall work on him.
WORK.
Extract a day & month easily
Sometimes you have a date, and you want to extract the day of the week and the month from it. That’s light work—use the TEXT function.
=TEXT(number, format)
number — the date (in this example)
format — instructions for how to return the day or month
Look at the preview above the formula. As we add more “d’s,” we determine the format of the day we want.
The same applies for the month:
FUN.
The Friday Fix playlist
Shem’s picks
✅ Neal.fun’s latest game is a crowdsourced internet road trip
✅ Learn about the Michelin system restaurants—and soon, hotels—dream of
✅ Why only earth has fire
✅ A breathing method to help you fall asleep
✅ Make perfect eggs every time
Have a great weekend,
— Shem
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