Recovery Update
“How does he sleep at night?
Mama, the nerve of this guy
To leave me so easy
Am I gonna be alright?”
If you haven’t read my last blog post, I suggest giving it a peek to provide context for this post. If not, then here’s the TLDR: within the span of a month, I was assaulted, lost a friend to cancer, and had a (now ex) partner abandon me out of the blue.
In the last two months that I’ve had to reflect on the aftermath of all this trauma, I’ve had a lot of time to think on a few things that I’m going to try to form into coherent sentences as I write this high on an edible.
The above song has really resonated with me these last couple months. In the song Maddie and Tae sing, “I wanna kick myself for falling so hard. Mama, can you die from a broken heart?” In doing some research on attachment theory, I’ve realized that Ryan was fearful-avoidant whereas I’m anxious-preoccupied. Neither of these attachment styles are ideal as they are both on extremes of an attachment spectrum. We should all aim for secure attachment, the happy medium. Unfortunately a lot of people are avoidant or anxious mostly from the results of a crappy childhood or poor upbringing from our parents. We cannot fault our parents for the way they raised us especially if they put in genuine effort. They tried their best. So it is up to us to heal our inner child and be our own parent that we needed as kids.
That said, I can look at Ryan’s way of handling the breakup as a result of his upbringing. He did tell me that he had neglectful parents and that his guardians and all the adults in his life were abusing him in some way, shape, or form. From there I can draw the line from his environment and upbringing to the way he dumped me. He associated love and intimacy and closeness with danger, so he had one foot out the door when things got too serious. I can see why he did that, but that does not make it okay. It is a selfish act to abandon someone you’re in a relationship with and not give them the courtesy of a proper conversation. Sadly that is the reality of the human experience. We have to be okay with not getting the closure we want. We have to accept the fact that, as the old cliché goes, hurt people hurt people. It’s a hard pill to swallow, and we all know how good I am at swallowing hard things, but it’s the truth! What he did hurt me, but what he did was also human. It is now up to me to heal the pain because I cannot rely on the perpetrator to also be the doctor.
Ryan isn’t the only one at fault here for the hurt I’m feeling. I am also partially responsible for that as I abandoned myself in the relationship. I tolerated inconsistent texting and poor communication when I should have been honest with myself and made that a non-negotiable. I abandoned the parts of me that needed attention and healing because I was so focused on being a good partner and staying focused on looking for small details that would somehow ruin the relationship. I was hypervigilant for anything that would hint at a rupture in the relationship, so I tried my best to make it as pleasant as possible for him. In the process, I didn’t make the relationship pleasant for myself. I enmeshed myself in to his being, and I ended up fetishizing my anxiety and paranoia. I made those traits a quintessential part of my personality that I forgot who Tim was. Tim is a good partner, a good friend, a good student, a good employee, and a good lover. The problem with that is that they’re all barometers reliant on external validation. I need to measure my worth in terms of how I relate to other people. If other people are gone and I’m the last man on earth, then how would I measure what kind of a person I am? I have no sense of inherent self-worth because I was taught to always be a man for others, altruism being the purest form of human goodness.
So how then do I find inherent self-worth? I had to ask myself what does self-worth look like for me? What does it mean for Tim to be a worthwhile person? Well, that took some time to answer. A worthwhile person to Tim shows community, love, self-care, nurturance, empathy, and validation. Since I can’t rely on other people to provide that, I need to be able to give that to myself. Digging further, what do those traits look like? How does community, love, self-care, nurturance, empathy, and validation look/sound/feel like to Tim? That’s the problem I’m facing.
I don’t know what those look like. What does it mean to be in community with others? What does love and self-care look like? The difficulty here for me is that I always question and over-intellectualize the human experience and try to pathologize everything down to a scientific equation. I tell myself that love is just a chemical reaction of dopamine and serotonin to perceived romantic actions, and that people who show empathy are socially conditioned to do so and because of that they are disingenuous when they say, “How can I help you?” What we call self-care is really just administrative biological upkeep like exercise and eating properly. I keep doubting whether or not any of this is actually of importance.
I have gotten to a point in therapy where intellectualizing my emotions and my constant search for their reasons have become unproductive in the healing process that I’ve forgotten how to just sit and be with my emotions. I’m uncomfortable in the silence as I keep asking my insiders for their reasons. The part of me that asks for validation; to that I ask, “Well, why do you need to feel validated?” When I think about a situation when a friend asks me something like “Am I a good person?” to which I respond, “If I say yes, would that make you feel better?” I feel like that’s such a cruel thing to say. Why can’t I just say “Yes, you’re an amazing person.” And why can’t I just do that for myself? Why can’t I just say to the part that needs validation “You’re a valid person” instead of “Why does validation make you feel good?”
I keep digging until I’ve struck oil, but I inherently want to know where that oil is coming from. So I keep digging, not knowing when to stop instead of just appreciating what I’ve already achieved. How do I get to a place of being comfortable with the silence from my emotions? I don’t know.
I know that I have a lot of Trauma to unpack. And yes, I’m going to capitalize the T in Trauma as it has significance to my mental state. But one Trauma at a time, Tim. It’s a lot for one person to handle, and we only have one Self. As I continue to over intellectualize my emotions down to its ugly core desperately trying to find a cure for the pain I’m feeling while I know that the search is futile, I find credence in the fact that a few years ago I was never able to verbalize my emotions and thought processes in this manner. And while the pain of the Trauma is still fresh and I don’t know how long it’s going to take to heal, I take comfort in the fact that at the very least I was able to acknowledge that pain.
Colin Farrell once said in an interview, “The older I get , there’s this familiarity with the pain of being human.”
The older I get, the more acquainted I get with the feeling of being hurt. The more I’m able to tolerate and accept it. It’s healing it that’s the hard part.
