Verbal Medication

[wordshelphurt]

The friend break up

I just had my first self-initiated friend break up.

It’s awkward because of course, I love this person dearly, I’ve spent so much time with them and truly care for their wellbeing. Still, the relationship had taken on a dynamic over the past few months that only seemed to be spiraling into darkness. Maybe worse, I feel like an asshole - like I should somehow be able to “tough out” a friendship with someone because of shared history; but that would be a premise for a dysfunctional relationship, wouldn’t it?

I have to admit, I didn’t handle it gracefully. My approach was attempt after attempt to jump off the phone, followed by a series of calls missed, until my eventual steep plummet into ghosting. I never addressed the problem directly, but how do you tell your best friend that you just can’t be there for them anymore when they refuse to be there for themselves?

At this time, I’m not sure that you can - because that person who doesn’t hear your suggestions of therapy, or living with purpose, or trying medication, probably isn’t ready to hear that they aren’t there for themselves. Even if they admit to their self-hatred, even if they make jokes about their sadness, I think the person who doesn’t even try to help themselves, probably can’t hear they have to from a friend yet. Then again, maybe I was scared to be that friend.

Personally, I’ve suffered two friend breakups in my life, and in both situations, I was the one who was left. During both instances, I felt a strong sense of injustice and rage toward the friend, as if they had abandoned me. Yet, looking back at both situations, I see that my friends were doing the best that they could with the resources they had at the time, and when they no longer were able to deal with my shit and my sadness, they had to go for their own mental health. In both instances, I came to respect them deeply for the strength they had to leave an important relationship that wasn’t healthy anymore.

And so, minor negativity and discomfort aside, I feel better. My theory is that whenever you feel a sense of peace after taking a risk, then you have made the right decision. I hope that in doing so, I’ve opened myself up to new friendships that are more aligned with my current self, and I also hope that, through my leaving, I’ve demonstrated the seriousness of the situation my friend is in.

Who knows what will come of it in the grand scheme of things? But that’s not my reason for writing; rather, I want to normalize the friend break up. It’s something I’ve heard so little of throughout the years, and yet, it does happen. Letting go of unhealthy relationships, at any degree of intimacy, is progress.

I hope you are well and I love you still.

[latinademais]

São Luís, Maranhão, Brazil. 1995. By Carles Solís.

[aizobnomragym]

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: non-monogamy meets jealousy

I am writing because I want to feel differently. I am hoping somehow that if the words leave my brain or the confines of a conversation that maybe I might realize that things are not as scary as they seem; but I am skeptical.

Some months ago, I entered a relationship with a woman who identifies as non-monogamous. At the time I thought: hmm, well, I have no problem with this conceptually. We are generally a long-distance couple anyway, so this might end up being a healthier situation for me than my previous long-distance relationships. And for a while, this was okay. I learned about her other girlfriends, observed her dating habits, but was secure in the knowledge that I am the primary partner.

During this time, we were also living in the same city and were able to enjoy each other’s company for about a month, an enormous blessing for a long-distance relationship: the gift of time. Yet, in the back of my mind, I was aware and even vocalized that “I am a traditionally jealous person. I am not sure how I will end up feeling about non-monogamy, but I suspect it may be difficult.”

Time passes, she goes back out onto the road and I stay at home: things are back to normal for a time. Then, miracle upon miracles, I am allowed to fly out and see her while she’s back in her home bases, visiting with key people in her life. This all goes well enough, but I learn that one of her girlfriends does not know I am visiting - the one who lives where I am now passing through. During this time, she also starts talking with me about all these friends and strangers she is attracted to, a dynamic previously nonexistent in our discourse.

After trying to maintain a level of cool and calm, approaching the situation through conversation and rationale, I lose it. I start to feel a sickness in my body: a head-throbbing, heart-pounding, gut-wrenching, dizzying and nauseating illness that has made it’s way to me every time I ever felt the first gnawings of a breakup on the horizon.

Now, we start fighting. We go to therapy together. We vow to figure this thing out, to have more open and honest communication, and so on. But by now, we have all seen this movie, right? We hit the iceberg a while ago, which may have even been at the beginning of the story when we were too happy to notice it. Now we’re on a sinking ship and we are trying to decide if we should just keep dancing to our graves, or do something drastic to try and save our asses.

I am no monster, I could not ask her to change; and even if I did, that change would never last because it could never be genuine, and I don’t want her to change who she is. At the same time, I am interested in changing myself: trying to distance myself away from the jealous person I have been and towards a more loving, open and sharing partner; but there are two problems. The first is, I have no idea how to take that journey. The second is, our trust is not rock-solid.

Look, I have not been overly socialized. I know that monogamy is no guarantee that a partner will stay. I know it’s a heteronormative practice that is indicative of ownership. I know that it’s an unrealistic way of relating because let’s face it, we all have eyes and libidos and, naturally, one person can’t satisfy all our sexual, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs for relating. I get it.

Still, when I think about her flirting and fucking and falling in love with someone else, my gut just curls inside itself and says a definitive, “no” because, for me, all this complication and upset is based in past relationship traumas. Let’s pause here and take a minute to recognize, this is my first real relationship in three years, and my last relationship was a dumpster fire of trauma-bonding, emotional abuse, and codependency; so, any relationship after that was going to hard for me, let alone one that, by its nature, daily pokes at my abandonment issues.

With my rose-colored glasses, I see this all as an incredible opportunity for me to conquer these past hurts; but on my gloomier days, I see this as an impossible task, in which I am set up to fail and fail badly. I feel a sense of injustice that I alone have to change, to do all this work to maintain a relationship. I feel a pang of guilt that I entered the thing in the first place, knowing full well that this was a likely outcome of my doing so. I feel anger toward myself, for not being able to just go along with it all, to take it in strides and make peace with it. I feel a lot.

I have not the slightest inclination of what may happen, but I hope something does because dancing to our graves is not how I want to end this relationship, I want to feel like we fought for our lives. Because at the end of the day, I love this woman, and she loves me.

Xoxo

[wordshelphurt]

Harder on myself: seeking forgiveness

I have been really sad lately; I am sure I am not the only one, what with Coronavirus having us all on lockdown with too much time on our hands, I can only imagine how many others are feeling blue. To be honest, that is what I thought was going on with me too: free-floating anxiety and depression caused by a global health pandemic; but then I started wanting to fight with my partner. I started digitally calculating her every move, how much we were in communication; I was looking for red flags and reasons to be upset, wanting to legitimize and project the sadness I was feeling onto her.

When we started dating, I wanted her to make me feel like I was okay, like I was not sick anymore. I wanted her to be my proof positive to the outside world that I was finally able to have healthy relationships so that maybe all those people I had hurt could see all the work I had done, and finally forgive me; but of course, that was not what happened. No, my girlfriend gave me no reason to feel that I was sick or dysfunctional or defective or any of the other fears I was feeling inside, but she also was not able to quell them from rising within my chest. First of all, she never could have: I was very careful to never reveal to her that I was not certain that I was really up to the task of loving someone; but more importantly, those fears were never about her or our relationship in any way: they were born of rhetoric nonexistent within our relationship; they were leftover scars from a wound that hadn’t healed properly.

Yet, it was not until talking with my mom about all this that I finally let sink in what my therapists have been saying to me for years: “yes, you are hard on the people around you, but you are much harder on yourself; you might try being kind to yourself.” I had always considered this as a minor issue, something to circle back to at some later moment; but, I now realize this was a much bigger deal than ever I gave it credit for being. In our conversation, I realized I am not sad because of my isolation, or my relationship, or my past; my girlfriend is not triggering me or making me feel anything but loved. No, I am sad because I am carrying the weight of every mistake I have ever made around with me all day, every day and it is dragging me down. When they were telling me to be kind with myself, I thought they meant I should be taking more bubble baths; but now I realize what they meant, was that it was and is okay to forgive myself.

I have made lots of mistakes in my life, but I also know by proxy of the empathy I have available to others, that those mistakes were not so much a reflection of the “bad person” I was inside but were more of a natural consequence of the ways I had been treated, which were generally unkind. I have tried to make amends, I have learned my lessons and changed my ways, but being forgiven is not something anyone can give to me: it is something I have to choose to walk into for myself.

So, I am resolving to try to forgive myself; to stop looking back in horror at who I was, and start trying to accept and love her - much as you would love a tired child acting out angrily. My past is not so much “bad” or “good”, but rather, it was. I want to take ownership of being the one who can set myself free from my unnecessary, self-inflicted guilt. I want to let go so that I can be lighter with the people around me. I want to stop walking on eggshells, waiting for the other proverbial shoe to drop when I have no reason to believe one has already fallen in the first place. Though I suspect the trajectory will be unclear, as it often is in recovery processes, I also suspect it is a journey worth taking.

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: empowered to love

For the first time in my life, I am going through the experience of loving someone with my eyes open. What I mean is: I have removed enough of the debris of my relationship trauma to be able to enter a state of relating with my consciousness and wisdom attached; still, even with all the glory and pride I find in this new level of intimate possibilities, I am also finding myself deeply uncomfortable, nervous, and confused.

For the first time in my life, my bonding is not trauma bonding, it is slow, boundaried movements of opening, trusting and understanding myself and my partner. I am no longer consumed with fantasies of forever, but I am experiencing this moment in front of me, trying hard not to consume it, not to overanalyze it, but to be present with my presence inside of it.

In my higher mind, I see that this is healthy, this is radical change toward a more sustainable way of loving and being loved; but, in my trauma mind, I feel a sense of lack because I have not given my entire life over in devotion to another, a pull to demolish my boundaries and live in codependency, and desire to devolve into emotional outbursts as tests of the other to see if they might stay.

Yet, although I have these old urges in my subconscious, I am simultaneously disgusted by them; not that I am disgusted with myself or my old ways of being, but that the thought of actually enacting these behaviors seems out of place, out of character, and no longer in accordance with my current self.

Ultimately, these impulses are merely leftover signals firing in my brain, reminding me of the old ways I was able to “secure” love, however unhealthily the methods may have been; and so really, they are nothing more than old neurons who need a bit more unwiring: something I know will only be possible while going through the process of learning to love in new, more consciously evolved ways.

So, why am I bothered; if I can understand the phenomenon logically, is it not moot, maybe even wasteful to indulge thoughts of discomfort? Here, I find myself having to remember that more than anything, these feelings are part of the process; and to quote the old adage, “feelings are not facts.” My sense of uncertainty is not a signal to me that I am loving in a way that is wrong, but rather, that I am loving in a way that is new; and further, I now have the tools and skills necessary to experience these feelings and impulses, and not act on them, but rather, to choose how I want to acknowledge these trauma responses.

What means the most is maybe not the knowledge, not even the relating, but the feeling of being empowered to love. Finally, I know that my trauma did not do irreparable damage to my ability to love and be loved; I do not have to continue around wondering if I may truly be incapable of intimate romantic relating. Arriving at this place has encompassed some of the most difficult internal work I have ever done, but I absolutely could not regret a moment of the time spent getting here because the payoff has been setting myself free to be able to give and receive love: to be fully in my power and to be fully human.

[wordshelphurt]

Recovery: honoring the time it takes

I have spent so much of my mental capacity thinking of the things I should have done, how and when they should have happened; I have used my time to live outside of the present: to rewrite the past and over-correct for the future. It’s not a new revelation; people the world over who suffer from anxiety or trauma will relate to this inability to allow present presence. Yet, what interests me is not the behavior, not its root cause, not the methods used to correct it; but rather, that the behavior reminds me of the sage maxim: “stop searching, and you will see" - a philosophy that has served as the underlying theme of so much of my recovery.

Of course, I had heard rumors that "time heals all wounds, ” but that did not stop me from launching into my recovery process with the thinking that if I bought all the books, attended the workshops, did the therapy, and the group therapy, if I took the pills, kept the journals, exercised, ate right, drank water, slept, and generally turned my life into a bastion of self-help, that I could be saved. Dreaming, “if I do this all day, every day, I could be done recovery in six months!”

Needless to say, life took my plans and threw them out of the figurative window. My recovery has been far from linear and is taking much longer than my naively anticipated timeline. However, what is frustrating to me is not that time per se, but that I can mentally conceptualize the key to so many of my problems, yet, I am unable to truly approach taking the steps necessary to achieving any resolution any concrete way.

For instance, since moving to a new city, I have had an incredibly difficult time forming new friendships. Please do not misunderstand: I have met innumerable nice people who I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a phone number from and have continually deluded myself, telling myself that: making friends did not matter because I was focused on myself, or my love life, or my career, or moving to a (different) new city. Yet, my therapist and I always came to the same conclusion: friends are a part of my life journey that I value highly, and it would be worthwhile and enriching to my experience to invest time in building healthy friendships.

Despite all the time I had lied to my therapist that I would, or demanded of myself that I should, it all came down to one day when I woke up and I was ready to turn on my phone and download some social apps. Looking back, it seems that all this time of delaying was really my body’s way of asking my brain to have patience. My body could acknowledge the validity of my brain, poking me with sharp pangs of loneliness or salty, streaming tears; but the trauma that was tangled around my body was tied too tight for me to ever take the steps my brain had set before me.

Even amidst all the understanding and compassion I have cultivated for myself and my process, I am frustrated by my inability to speed up time, or more truthfully, to speed up my recovery. Though I may know the pathway I will walk, I have trouble admitting that there are still spaces I need to crawl through. I have not fully come to terms with the fact that honoring my higher self, means honoring her timeline; and if history is any teacher, she will emerge only when my brain ceases to threaten her to appear. So let this serve as a reminder to all of us who struggle with anxiety, patience, or a loud inner critic: what we seek is unfolding, all in good time, if we allow it.

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: dating, jaded

There are not many people I wish to get close to. No, I am not as detached as I seem; I am aware that there are so many (probably incredible) folks that want to get to know me, but I choose not to let them in. This self-inflicted isolation is only further complicated by the recurrence of those few which I do attempt to know, reopening and salting my copious abandonment wounds, only to leave me lonelier than they had found me.

It goes like this: I am alone in my room, and I am happy alone - until I am not. Next, it’s time to go out, not in search of anyone, but just to shake off some seclusion and to feel a part of a crowd. Then, the desperation sets in - I’m out, but not finding anyone; and suddenly, one will emerge to rescue me from my state of solitude.

At first, I will resist you. I will study, observe, and test to try to understand your intentions - wanting to answer the question, “will you hurt me?” before I’ve even learned what you do for a living.

But, I eventually will try to let you in. I will talk about you in therapy; I will ask how to text you, how to know if you like me back, how to know how to be safe with you.

Now, you bristle. I’m no longer the aloof, “cool” girl you thought I would be. You will withdraw. Not all at once, typically, but slowly you will fade out of my life - hoping that I don’t notice.

But I notice everything. Thankfully, I now have the sense to let you go, but it’s not long before the cycle has repeated itself and there’s another you on my sofa, texting my phone, occupying my mental space.

So, I’m starting to get jaded. Each time the movie replays itself, I’ve deepened the trauma wound. This endless exposure therapy is not what I need; rather, I crave love, compassion - a rehabilitation.

Regardless, I am showing up for myself, to be that safe place, and that’s great, and it’s new. But how can I expect to grow when I am constantly having to repair? It's not rhetorical, and yet, it's unanswerable and I wish someone could explain to me how it all ends up making sense in the end.

For now, I await the moment when I may water the seed in the garden, instead of continually replanting it.

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: heartbroken to hopeful

I am embarrassed to admit how I have let you treat me all these years. I am angry with myself for buying into these illusions of soulmates, or that we had a love so strong it could shatter trauma. I am upset with you for not doing the work of becoming the adult that it takes to foster sustainable love with me. I am ashamed of the part of me that still loves you and carries you around in my head. I am depressed to reflect on the time I wasted in the hope you would open up to me. I am bitter about the rejection. But most of all, I am proud of myself for walking away.

Following a month of hot and cold behavior, you finally admitted you didn’t want to be with me. I cried and cried for hours that day. You held me and we laid in bed, but it was already over - irreparable damage was done - and you knew it. So did I, and yet, for some reason, we made plans to talk again.

I called my mom, howling in pain, barely able to breathe between sobs, but she talked me down to a place where I could sleep until I went to work with bloodshot eyes.

But you didn’t call. Why would you? So instead, I called my friends. I had them coach me, over and over, about how this was not new or unexpected from you, how I deserve better, how it hurts but it seems time to move on. But I didn’t want to. I wanted you to think it was a mistake to lose me. I wanted you to want me more than you clung to your fear, to put in the work to stay by my side, to love me more.

With a sudden rush of adrenaline I called you - I “ended things” - though we both know you did in my bed that morning. You acted shocked - something I will never understand - and then burst into tears; but not over me, over yourself. Fine, heal yourself first, that’s what I did, too. But then you asked me to explain life and love to you. Could you not hear how much I was aching from cutting you out of all my pictures?

It ended, thankfully, and just days later, I felt better. It was so intoxicating to no longer have the clouds of anxiety and dread about “whether or not I may hear from you” or “if you might love me today” hanging over my head that I found myself smiling in public to myself. The illusion was broken.

I believe in my heart of hearts it was these magic words said to me by so many friends, lovers, and therapists over the years that broke the spell you had placed on me: “you deserve to be with someone who wants to be with you.” Maybe it didn’t seem like much, but saying it to you, telling you that I deserve that and having it affirmed by you, with the added recognition in your affirmation that you are not that someone, is what set me free.

So I’m releasing those toxic feelings day by day, and in so doing, I’m releasing us. No, I’m not over yet. Of course, I’m not. But I will be - I can finally see that light at the end of the tunnel. And for that, I am beyond grateful.

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: I wanted to say "yes"

Recently, I was contacted by an ex to go out for a drink. I figured it was most likely just a nice gesture on his behalf to welcome me to the city that we now both live in and so I accepted the invitation without much thought.

But then I started thinking, where have you been for the past year? I agonized over what it may mean, trying to decipher why after all this time living in radio silence, he was suddenly reappearing on my radar. Partially, I blamed Mercury going retrograde, which is notorious for being a phase of re-materializing exes, but that explanation alone did not fully satisfy my anxiety.

Then, after two weeks of wondering, I realized, I simply can not know what his intentions are - even if I asked him outright, I will never be able to know the innermost workings of someone else’s mind or motivations. At this point, I was finally able to begin to consider how I felt. Once I put the option to say “no” back on the table, I was able to better contextualize him as a real person, instead of my ex. I started considering the way that thinking about him makes me feel, what it’s like to look at a photo of his face, what the last interactions and exchanges we had looked like, and I found that the thought of him evoked so much of our past relationships that I felt physically nauseous; I couldn’t imagine having an ambiguous interaction with him without having to be intoxicated.

But that is not what I want; I want to do all things, not just handling difficult interactions, from a place of confidence and security in myself, and so I concluded that it would violate my boundaries to have a drink with him and I declined the invitation.

However, after shutting things down, I still felt drawn to seeing him; no, I didn’t want to just be cool and have a casual interaction, I found that what I was wanting was to do the hard thing: to look him in the face and tell him the ways that he had hurt me throughout the years. No, I don’t hope to drag him out of his house to tell him what an asshole he was to me, I want to speak the truth of my experience so that he has the opportunity to know and care for my emotional self that he was not able to care for in the past. I want to let myself be known, so he has the chance to know me.

No longer am I trying to impress him, convince him I’m low maintenance and cool - the perfect girl for him to partner with. Now, I just want to be present with him, allow him to be present with me if he so chooses, and see what potential exists for a new connection to form. I’m no longer willing him to love me, I’m allowing us the opportunity to have the relationship we have - whatever that may mean.

And at this point, I don’t know if he will respond, or if the idea of closure is even on his mind or in his mouth; but I’ve set my intention, I’ve made it known, and I feel good about the ways I have approached this situation from my full integrity.

[fuwaprince]

no matter what! keep choosing recovery!

[wordshelphurt]

Notes on love: I want to love a "nice guy"

Springtime is when we fall in love, right? You crush so hard the weight of your heart drops into your stomach every time you see someone with their same gait walk by you on the street; and then, of course, the butterflies come out of your ears, every song you hear sounds like a love song, and so on and so forth.

I’m so nostalgic for that feeling that I could cry; really, I am. I’ve been dating a lot, chasing that high and never quite finding it. I’m starting to feel like maybe I’ve outgrown the naïveté it takes to fall madly in love, head over heels for someone, or that the Universe has me on some kind of take-a-number style waiting list, wherein I have to endure seven hundred and one dates before I’m awarded my knight in shining armor.

Here’s the thing: I’ve had enough therapy to know that a person I’m currently on a date with may be a terrible match for me, but not enough therapy for me to not be attracted to them. It’s as if I seem to only have romantic interest for those types of people who would not only break my heart, but they would shatter it into a million pieces with a smile on their face; and the people I want to love, the people who truly care about me and want to grow with me as a person, I feel unflinchingly platonic attraction towards.

I know that I should be proud of my ability to sense that I’m on a bad date, still enjoy the company, and then safely exit the situation; it’s something I couldn’t have dreamed of being able to execute a year ago, and now I do it on a weekly basis, but instead, I’m frustrated that I just can’t change my attraction barometer with the force of my will.

So, if you’re out there and you’re reading this, person who wants to treat me right/person I routinely overlook/kind stranger I haven’t met yet, please be patient with me. I want to love you and I want to let you love me. It’s just that I’ve learned to associate love with fear and pain, and I’m trying to re-learn how to experience love as a pleasurable, well-intentioned effort on the part of two people to communicate care and affection to one another. I’ll get there, maybe by next spring.

[mapeauaime]

https://www.instagram.com/p/BuWqXbFle2h/

[naturaekos]

[thebutchriarchy-deactivated2019]

Medusa with the Head of Perseus, Luciano Garbati, 2008

[she-initiates-deactivated202006]

“Where you are understood, you are at home. Understanding nourishes belonging. When you really feel understood, you feel free to release yourself into the trust and shelter of the other person’s soul.”

— John O’Donohue, Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

[lohver]

you’re not too sensitive. you’re not overreacting. if it hurts you, it hurts you.