Sooooo..... I took an unexpectedly long hiatus from my blog. First reason is two words: Grad School. It has been a wild year to say the least and I promise that I will write about it for all my wonderful readers. The topic today has been something that I have been pondering for a very long time and I think now is the time. I am ready to open up about a part of my life that I have not really discussed but I realize that it is a long story to tell with many factors to consider. So with that said, this will be a multiple chapter series.
Love Makes People Uncomfortable:
Last fall in my class that covers the "Social & Cultural Foundations of Multicultural Education," I did a presentation that focused on the concept of dialogue. In short, I presented on who was allowed to engage in dialogue and who was incapable of doing so. Of course, this was not about day to day dialogue but rather on the dialogue that is essential to engage in societal-changing-dialogue that counteracts systematic oppression (I am going to share this topic with you all in another blog soon because, used in the correct manner, this is life changing shit that we all can use). The first construct that one needs to engage in dialogue is Love. And when I said that, my classmates were immediately uncomfortable.
Why? For one, we don't talk about love in a realistic way. Especially at the time of year when you see all these Holiday and Christmas romance movies, Valentine's Day, etc, where you demonstrate love in some extravagant way. But beyond that, I don't think that people are just generally open to a simple kind of love. The kind of love that many people have for babies and even for pets. The unconditional kind.
Again, why? Probably because of the hurt that other people have caused us. When we are hurt, we find ways to protect ourselves so that we never experience that kind of hurt again. The sad reality can be is that we spend so much time preventing something from happening that we unintentionally create other hurts. Instead of being good people, we become toxic and we hurt other people. Continuing a cycle that maybe we didn't even start let alone understand to begin with. Of course, this is a vast oversimplification but I want you understand what happened in my class that day.
The first construct being Love, broke people. "Why, do I need to have love to be able to have a conversation?" This lead me to think, "wow, we really have to engage in critical conversations on love and loving the people around us." But as I explain all of this, my intention for this blog is to actually talk about love in my own life. And when I reflected about this, I began to understand more about myself, the relationships that I have had and the world I want to live in.
Let's talk about abandonment:
Just like my peers, conversations on love are challenging for me. And along with that, Attachment is so hard for me to process. I have learned so much about people, vulnerability, love, attachment, and abandonment in the last few years of self discovery. I learned that I am hesitant to allow someone in close enough to me because I am afraid. I fear of people walking away from me. People just waking up and leaving me behind. Someone just disappearing on me and never to reach out ever again. Why? Because my mother left and I never saw her again. I cant even remember that last real moment that I saw her. It was impossible to know that there would be a moment I needed to preserve in my brain forever. I couldn't prepare for it. I was 4.
At 4 years old, how could you know? But that moment, so early in my life shaped so much of who I am now. My fears of building attachment had me push more people away rather than pull them close. My fears of forgetting transformed my my mind to not forget many things but also peoples names or faces.
One of the tragedies is that I know that people come and go. No one is going to stay a part of your life forever. But some of the circumstances in which some people do exit your life can still painful. I never knew that my mother wasn’t going to come back. I never knew if she intended to come back. I never even knew why she actually left to begin with. I couldn’t understand. I was four years old.
At four years old all you need, all you want is to be loved. When someone leaves, it feels like you are unloved and unlovable. This is something that I carry with me into my relationships. This was something that I didn’t understand it until more recently, but it was something causing harm. And if it wasn’t causing harm at the moment, it had the potential to. I know that it’s something that I need to work on everyday to this day.
It isn’t easy to heal but it’s necessary. It’s necessary because without understanding what it is that you’re doing, you can cause harm. I repeat this because more people need to hear like I did. You can harm the people around you without even knowing about it. You could go on living like it was their fault, like they did something, they said something and it was all their fault and it very well could have been. But in order to be better, we need to also recognize our own roles in these relationships, admit our faults too and heal ourselves. Understanding how we attach ourselves to others and how we crave to be loved is essential in this. This is something that I have done and continue to do for myself.
So why put something like this out there? I want people to understand that we all deal with attachment in different ways. We all have work that we can do to understand ourselves and how we deal with attachment. I fear forming attachments because of my own struggles with encountering abandonment but your attachments and triggers may be vastly different.
Let's Talk about Heartbreak:
"Just the two of us" is playing on the car radio. I am transported to the moment once more. I am 4 years old, it is dark outside and I am in the front seat of the car. I look to the driver and it is my step dad driving. He is staring intently on the road ahead and am almost positive I can see the faint outline of a tear dropping off his face from the left side. That car ride was the last thing I can remember from living with my mother and step dad.
"7 years" by Lukas Graham was playing and I was doing everything that I could to hold myself together. I just had to make it to the next block and I could fall apart. I had to focus and drive the car to our destination. Two days before, I was just dumped and the love of my life who was in the passenger seat waiting to be dropped off. We were sitting in silence with the radio on playing the pop songs of the day and that new song of his comes on. It hit me so hard in that moment, I wasn’t good enough. I was struggling to breathe. I was being left behind again.
My biological mother leaving was my first heartbreak. I used to have trouble falling asleep because I would lay there thinking about this. I would think about how I missed her and how I didn't even know if she was alive. Because why would she stop calling me a few years after she left so suddenly? I was happy but she wasn't, so she left. Moved across the country. I don't know if it was easy for her or if that was the reason why she had my step dad drop me off at that last time.
The relationship that I had with a wonderful woman for 5.5 years came to an end suddenly. One day, she woke up and realized that she wasn't happy. Something that she feared for a long time. And even though we talked about it many times, we couldn't maintain being happy together. The devastation and realization that was being abandoned echoed in my head as my heart shattered when I heard the words, "I'm done."
It happened again and again. The next time wasn't tied to iconic musical exits but it still hurt. My heartbreaks have been someone else making the decision to leave and me struggling to hold things together but ultimately failing to do so. The shattering feeling when someone says, "I don't know if I can do this anymore," didn't lose the impact. The hollowness I felt just rang louder each time. At least with my romantic relationships, I know that I put in all that I could. What was left after processing that emptiness, was for me to deal with on my own.
And that is the healing that meant earlier. That is what we all must work on to be better lovers and people. So as I acknowledge those heartbreaks, I honor the people and the experiences. I only discussed some of the women that hurt me because this series is going to focus on my thoughts of romantic love. I am stepping outside of my comfort zone and putting it out there in the case that this might help someone, somehow. Stay tuned for chapter 2 as I will discuss in more detail my exes.
Comments