Something that has been weighing heavily on me lately is the feeling that I will be alone forever. Not in a crazy cat lady way, but in the way that as a relationship person I will move through life collecting quasi-serious long term relationships that inevitably end because of my inability to be content. But then I think back on my relationships and I didn’t leave most of them because I wanted someone else, I left because I was being told that I didn’t deserve to be treated the way I thought I deserved.
Years of relationships built heavily upon emotional abuse. I actually STAYED with a man who made me feel so awful about myself that I started curating a wardrobe of soccer mom clothing simply because I couldn’t mentally endure the fight that would ensue if I dressed in a way he didn’t think was appropriate. I was gaslit for years, so much so that I developed coping mechanisms that scared me. I was aggressively defensive and bitter all the time. I could only react one of two ways, if I was spoken to cruelly I would all but shut down. One time on a road trip in Nashville my boyfriend (not my most recent trip or most recent boyfriend) told me to shut the fuck up while standing in line for BBQ and I don’t think I spoke for 5 hours. But when I did choose to stand up for myself it was 0-100 yelling because I never felt heard.
One of my favorite stories from my late college relationship was when my boyfriend at the time and I were upstairs and he was screaming at me, when he was done he walked downstairs, greeted my friend with “Hey! I wiped your car off this morning since it was snowing!” before he happily walked out. When I came downstairs my friend looked at me and said “there’s no way that was the same guy that I just heard screaming at you?”
Clearly my frontal lobe was not fully connected and my decision making skills could’ve used some work but that’s not what this is about. The more I thought about what I’ve put myself through the more I realized I had never really tried to figure out if I had ever healed. Then recently someone I cared about spoke to me in a way that put me right back in that old relationship, for a minute I lost my breath. At that point I realized I wasn’t fully healed but it also made me realize something even more important. I agree that in order to be in a relationship you have to both love yourself and continue to do constant work on yourself but I disagree with the notion that you have to be fully healed before being with someone else.
Life isn’t something that most of us float through, unscathed. To some extent we are all constantly in a state of healing and the important thing is finding someone who facilitates that. It occured to me that I need someone patient and kind and that might be like a “yeah, duh” kind of thing but it never occured to me that one of the most hurtful things a significant other has ever done to me is purposefully made me feel like an annoyance. I used to have this “nervous tick” like thing where I would obsessively ask my boyfriend if he was okay, because he was usually mad, but asking him would only make him more mad but if I didn’t ask we would sit there in silence and I would feel like there wasn’t a bigger burden in the world to him than me.
Remembering all this that I shut out the night we broke up made me realize that maybe I don’t need to worry about whether or not I’ll be alone forever and maybe I should make one of my self care priorities limiting my intimate involvement to a person who actively cares about me enough to be patient with me while I unlearn the behaviors that are now ingrained in me, that is kind enough to understand that they need to be conscious of the ways in which they treat me so that old wounds don’t reopen. I’m not sure if there is someone for everyone but what I know is that everyone deserves to heal and be loved and I believe both of those things can happen simultaneously if you prioritize yourself enough to be with someone who believes that as well.
No mo’ mayonnaise
Yes!