It’s so corny and obvious and I hate that something so cliche is just an actual fact of my existence, but I’ve really been reckoning this year with the reality that I can trace so many of my major issues and neuroses regarding my dating life and just the way I have trouble building relationships in general directly back to my dad
Like I have such deep seated trust issues and major fear of abandonment that I completely beat myself up over feeling all the time, but it shouldn’t be so hard for me to sit back and be like oh yeah, my dad left my mom after they had been together 30 years for the woman he’d been having an affair with for almost a year, it happened when I was at the very onset of my adult life and completely destabilized the foundation of my own family that I had lived and carried with me without question for 18 years, so like…I think that might mess anyone up at least a little bit. It’s also something that I never ever talk about openly and I think only two people in my entire life besides family and friends from the island have ever known about me (two past boyfriends.) It happened at the beginning of that year when Hannah had long since relapsed and I knew that she was going to die soon, and honestly my deepest primal instinct in the face of that reality was just that I knew I would regret it forever if I didn’t try to maintain a relationship with my dad while we’re both still alive. And I still think that’s true and I stand by it, and my dad and I do have a good relationship and always have despite everything, but I do think that making that choice caused me to push down a lot of the emotions I would have naturally experienced in the wake of that, which are now starting to resurface in a major way as something I completely have not dealt with at all and it’s really fucking me up and kind of making it hard for me to function recently because it’s taking up so much of my headspace and influencing my actions or lack thereof lately.
I’ve really woken up to the fact recently that I don’t have a single person in Portland anymore that I would call a true, close friend. All of my closest friends are people who live in other states, people who I met here or in Washington that moved away or people I met on the internet who are scattered all over the country and the world. And those friendships are great and I cherish them so much! But I do also feel like all of my internet friends secretly hate me and that’s not a great thing to feel about yourself even when I know it’s not actually the truth. It is really hard when I don’t feel like I have anyone physically around me that I can call up at a moment’s notice to hang out with or whatever, or that I genuinely feel like people would be/are annoyed by my friendship. I would like to start getting out more and meeting new people somehow, I’d like to maybe start trying to meet guys again and at least look for a new fuck buddy (WHATEVER I’m mad sexually frustrated and I’ve been without an FWB since the summer), but I’m just getting all up in my own head about my perceived unlikeability and feeling trapped by my own extremely low self esteem that I don’t even know how to begin putting myself out there because I feel like nobody could ever possibly want or need me in their lives.
I want to be less hard on myself for feeling these things, but I don’t know how to approach actually overcoming them. Because the thing is, because I’ve actually had this major formative event in my life, I know that my fear of abandonment is not an irrational fear!! Or at least, the fear itself may be irrational in whatever situation I may be in at the time, but the fact that I have it isn’t just something that came out of nowhere because it’s the direct result of my lived experience. I’d like to think that it’s a totally normal response to that kind of trauma and I want to allow myself to feel like that’s okay and be aware of its existence in myself. But I don’t know how to manage or minimize its influence in my life, I don’t know how to go out and try to look for and build up long lasting, fulfilling relationships with people and with potential partners, or even to successfully maintain the ones I already have, because more and more these days I’m always feeling that constant paralyzing fear that friends and partners could just drop me out of the blue and I’ll feel completely drained of my capacity to love and emotionally invest in other people again. It feels hopeless to even go out and try when I know I’m just gonna continue to be hurt over and over again in my life.
The irrational part of it I think for me, and which I KNOW isn’t true but I can’t bring myself to trust or believe, is that I really truly just feel deeply unloved at my core - I feel like I have no foundation of love and trust in my life to build me up and help me feel strong when things are difficult or when I’m unsure of myself. And I know that’s a lie my stupid brain is telling myself!! I do have family and friends who love me, and there are people who miss me when I’m not around and would miss me if I were gone. Logically I know that’s the truth. But I just can’t shake feeling so deeply fucking lonely every day of my life, and feeling lonely because I feel completely unloved and unlovable and unworthy of accepting people’s love. And I’m having so much trouble trying to work on that because the fact is that every person that I try to reach out to or become closer to is just me opening myself up to another opportunity to be rejected, and I panic and withdraw and just reinforce my own loneliness. It’s NOT GOOD.
I’ve definitely noticed that the way I approach relationships as an adult falls into two pretty clear scenarios - I either try to keep myself as emotionally detached as possible as a way to protect myself so that I don’t have to feel the kind of hurt that happens when something ends or changes, OR I get way too emotionally invested in something that I think could work out and then I end up completely shattered and empty when it doesn’t. There have been a couple situations in my life where one of those eventually ends up leading into the other and those are the worst of all. I need to find new ways of interacting with people but I honestly don’t even know how to start stepping out of those patterns, because all of my actions are so deeply influenced by this almost pathological instinct to protect myself and my feelings from more potential trauma. (Also, on a side note, I know that a lot of these issues I have do stem from my dad’s actions and their impact on my family, and a lot MORE of them, more on the romantic/sexual side of the way I interact with people, have more to do with my history of vaginismus and the emotional and physical struggles I went through when I was dealing with it and treating it on my own, but that’s a topic that I don’t feel emotionally equipped to also tackle today SO MAYBE SOME OTHER TIME)
I also feel real gross about myself for feeling these things I do because it really comes off like I think the world just revolves around me - like if friendships or relationships in my life come to an end or just change that it has to be because it’s my fault and people hate me or I must have unknowingly done something wrong to make them turn away from me. Again, my logical brain knows that people have their own lives and that 99% of the time things like that actually have nothing to do with me or the way people feel about me. I can’t expect the people that I love and care for to also be there for me 100% of the time I need them and in the way that I need them. But also like, I don’t know….I feel like it’s not too much to ask for that I have even one non-familial relationship in my life that I can trust to be mutually loving and supportive and lasting. Maybe it is too much to ask. Maybe I could have more of those kinds of friendships or relationships if I stopped doubting myself and stopped allowing my insecurities about love to eat me alive. Ugh, I don’t know. This whole thing is a mess and I’m just vomiting out all the ugly things I’ve been thinking about lately and I feel like an open wound all the time now. It’s hard.