My husband’s moving truck is here. I’m listening to the sounds of plastic wrap, footsteps, and a dolly while I sit locked away in my office. Looking out the window, I watch as pieces of our life from the past 10 years get loaded and packed away.
Later today I’ll go pick up my own keys for my own apartment, and bring Thor’s ashes. He’ll be my “person” to come home to. And tomorrow my own moving truck will come to take what’s left of my life from this house and deliver it to my new space.
I know this step is necessary for me. I know that I need to be forced to work on myself if I ever hope to feel fulfilled in this life. The other day I cried to my husband as we laid on the carpet in his new apartment. I told him about the 82 year old man in the hospital who was actively dying. His kidneys were failing, his heart was failing, and every possible treatment was contraindicated by another one of his comorbidities. But this man refused hospice. He refused comfort care. He and his wife were determined and said that he had such a drive to live, and that he was a fighter.
And I didn’t understand.
I didn’t understand why this man would want to keep living. What was so great about his life? What was keeping him going? What was the point?? I joked, partially joked, that even if I had been diagnosed with skin cancer, I’d ask for hospice. The doctor would say, “um… that’s not necessary. We just need to excise it…” I don’t know what drives my life. I don’t know what the point is of getting out of bed in the morning. And I think… that a lot of my issues may stem from my lifelong fear of abandonment.
I’ve watched a TikTok from Maddie Malekos so many times, trying to process my feelings, find my trauma, and own my participation. In it, she says:
Wait, you don’t have to go right now, you can stay for a little bit, right? Or you can take me with you and I can cheer you on from the sidelines or just sit in the background, right? You don’t have to leave me. hah….. you don’t have to leave me.”
I felt that. As it played on repeat I sunk deeper into my chair and reflected on my relationships… my behaviors in relationships. Sometimes it was self-sabotage and I felt vindicated when they’d actually leave. Sometimes I’d be so caught up in people pleasing behaviors and masking myself that I’d get lost. It has been such a lifelong pattern to continually alter my personal boundaries in order to try to keep people around. If I could accomplish that, then that would “prove” I was loveable. Because if they left, it was proof that I was unlovable, I was unworthy, and that my existence had no point.
I told myself that I required the external validation. I had been conditioned to believe that my own thoughts, opinions, and self-image were invalid. My feelings were invalid. I was conditioned to believe that I didn’t know what was best for me and I was incapable of making my own decisions. If I wanted something or believed in something that went against the opinion of my father or the culture I grew up in, I was shamed into thinking that something was wrong with me. The only way I could find validation or love was from external sources. It’s an extremely difficult brain shift to start believing that I am valid and whole just as I am. It’s still extremely difficult to maintain my sense of identity, my boundaries, my sense of worthiness without crowdsourcing validation. Sometimes I do an excellent job, but it’s hard not to shift back into old patterns.
The video resonated because I’ve had those feelings. I’ve had the desperation to try to make someone stay when they didn’t want to. It’s a desperation that comes from believing that if they don’t want to stay, or if they have the capacity to walk away from me that they never loved me. If they loved me, they would understand how deeply it would hurt… and how could they justify doing that “to me”.
But it’s not something that they do “to” me. Maybe sometimes because of me. A lot of times because of their own needs. It’s taken me hurting someone else that I care about so much to truly understand. And to understand that if I had done the work I needed to do before… if I had taken care of myself as my own main character and not justified sacrificing my own goals as a “healthy” compromise… then maybe I never would have had to cause so much pain.
That’s a hard realization to have. And it’s hard to not get stuck in a place of self-loathing, of shame, of guilt. I could never truly understand what it meant to have to love myself before loving someone else. Projecting the responsibility of my sense of worthiness onto someone else is actually the easy way out. It removes me from all responsibility of looking internally, performing a proper and honest assessment of my strengths/weaknesses/desires, and then doing the work.
So what is my fear of abandonment? Why do I feel like “abandonment” is necessary to include in a list of my hard limits or boundaries? I’ve lost people and relationships all throughout my life. I’ve always survived. I’m still here. Are my attachment issues also related to this fear of abandonment? Probably. What a ridiculous concept, though, that my hyper-vigilance and overactive nervous system that try to keep me from pain and trauma are actually what keeps me in a state of dissociation. It keeps me ungrounded. It keeps me from being a real person with my own personality. That fear of being rejected has been so strong… that I abandon myself.
Lunar Lilies 