in the space between the lovers, we are forced to face ourselves

“I feel lonely and sad. I want love. I want to see [the crush]. And at the same time I want to not want love. I want to feel free. I am really unsure whether the best thing is to allow myself to desire love (because otherwise I would be denying myself my desires) or to let go because this desire is causing me suffering. I also don’t know how to let go. How do you let go [of] something you’ve desired for half of your life? I remember vividly being a teenager and saying how no one loved me and being told that someday I will meet someone who will love me. I didn’t need to meet someone. I needed to feel loved by my parents, but I did not understand that and neither did they. And he never came. No one came to love me the way I needed to be loved.”

From My Journal, Day 154

I swung like a pendulum between aching for love and longing to be free from my desire. I was terrified by not knowing when love would come, when I would be held and kissed again. I was gasping to feel someone else’s presence. And I was desperate to escape emptiness and pain amplified by their absence.  

In the space between the lovers, I was forced to face my own choices and how I truly felt about them. I could no longer pretend that I was excited about schoolwork and cared to pursue the goals I set for myself. I could no longer ignore the dysfunction permeating all my friendships and other platonic relationships, and the anxiety stirred by their proximity. I could no longer affirm that I was happy with the life I built and liked the person I had become.

The future did not inspire me. It frightened me. I felt ungrounded, helpless and scared. I had been here before. I was a teenager at the time. My world was turned upside down, and for the first time in my life I was confronted with the ugly side of humanity. My entire belief system collapsed. I lost faith in God, and I ceased to trust people. Disillusioned and guarded, I built walls around me, and within my psychological confinement I plunged deep into depression. It was the closest I ever came to committing suicide, but I was paralyzed by pain and fear. I had no financial and cognitive resources due to my young age, and I had no one to turn to for help. Thus, I doubled down on my defenses, and the need to prove, protect and provide for myself. It took me almost a decade to fully recover from depressive episodes, but I did not restore my faith, and I did not allow myself to be in a position wherein I depended on someone else for safety and livelihood again.     

Some years and several avoidant relationships later, I found myself lying on a couch and crying in despair because there was nothing left for me to grasp onto. Life as I knew it was falling apart before my very eyes. The person I thought myself to be - the persona I constructed to protect and provide for myself, and exclusively relied on for many years - was disintegrating. Aside from the breakup, there were not many changes or challenges in my objective reality. It was all yet to come. But the veil I perceived said reality through was violently ripped off my face and I could no longer lie to myself.

I knew I needed to let go of my self-imposed goals, skin-deep trauma-bonded friendships, and artificial ideas of my ideal desired self. I could see none of it was working. But my ego resisted. I was afraid that without anything concrete to tie my identity to I would wonder and drift like a bum. I believed that without any external goals to attach my worth to I was unworthy. On the surface, I felt I needed to be esteemed in the eyes of society, and have purpose and direction in my life. Underneath it all, however, - beneath everything I thought would make me a complete fulfilled individual - there was a need to protect myself. But my defense mechanisms were failing me. It was time to surrender my armor. It was time to take the walls down. Without bringing it to my conscious awareness, I felt it was time to demolish my belief system once again, now intentionally and on my terms.   

I cried on the phone with my mother for hours lamenting that I did not know what to do. I am grateful to her for staying with my hysteria during those times, but I am glad I did not heed any of her advice about alternative means to establish myself in my professional life and settle down in my personal life. She wanted me to be happy, and like myself she confounded happiness with certainty. She believed I needed to keep trying – to apply to a different graduate program, meet other men, and get new hobbies. But I had done it before. In my early twenties, in the midst of depression and its accompanying darkness, disenchanted and distrustful, I drew a map of where I wanted to go and what I wanted to become, and I remained faithful to that path – the very same path which led me to the wreckage I was facing now. My life came full circle. Except this time around life did not strike. Disappointed with my choices, I took a sledgehammer into my own hands.  

My resistance to taking action - my not knowing what to do - was the answer I needed. I needed to accept not knowing. I needed to stay with the uncertainty. I needed to do nothing. It was the wisest choice, and the most difficult one. Uncertainty about the future felt more intolerable than the pain of the past. Uncertainty was more exasperating than the daily frustrations of my academic life, more unsettling than the anticipated deceit in my friendships, and more heart-wrenching than the accustomed letdowns in my romantic relationships. There was no excitement about new adventures and endless possibilities, which are ubiquitously advertised by social media. There was dread. Afraid of flying into the unknown, I would had rather drowned by anchoring myself to the known misery of the past.   

Fear of the unknown was the reason I clung to the crush. Surely, I did not know the crush, but I became intimate with my fantasy about him. I also had full control over the fantasy. I did not want to face uncertainty. I did not want to face the fact that I was dissatisfied with my degree, that I was alone and I had to bear the responsibility for my choices alone, that my relational needs were not met, and I had no clue when I would find the one and when I would be held and kissed again. I so desperately wanted to be held and kissed.

I still latched onto the fantasy of the one – the one who would relieve my burden of braving the world and spare me the need to address my own inadequacies by making up for my shortcomings with his strengths, the one who would save me from me. Like a child who fell and bruised her knees, I wanted to be held in safety and comfort, and have all my sorrows kissed away. But I was no longer a child. I was a woman. I was a grown woman who had just dived into the abyss of childhood trauma, painful memories, unconscious ego-driven choices, limiting beliefs, and torturous awareness of it all. I was embraced by my shadow, and it held me tightly in its grip.

the mind cannot see what it cannot accept

“The very thought of [them] makes me depressed; it makes me feel helpless and abused and targeted. This feeling is all too familiar for me […] I felt the same way about some of my friends in the past. It makes me feel very uneasy. And it has a very strong hold over me. It gives me anxiety.”

From My Journal, Day 81

I often felt crippling anxiety around friends and acquaintances. I stayed up at night ruminating on my interactions with them. I was overcome by strong emotions, i.e., fear and dread, shame and guilt. My thoughts were racing. I felt restless and uneasy.

Many said I was overthinking. I was too sensitive. It was all in my head. I needed to let it go and take it easy, or see a therapist or psychiatrist about it.

In the presence of others, I unconsciously resorted to people pleasing or bullying. I made myself small by self-deprecating and playing a victim, or I made myself big by being loud and aggressive. I talked incessantly. I dominated every conversation I was in. I constantly drew attention and roused laughter. I was much like a circus animal performing tricks on stage to entertain and satiate emotional hunger of my spectators. Except those were not tricks. They were often real stories about my painful and lonely existence that some seemed to enjoy hearing about and others were too timid to walk away from.

I was so caught up in the day-to-day drama, I was not able to see clearly. I continually went in and out of the state of awareness, which was accompanied (or perhaps triggered) by repeated spikes in stress hormones followed by inevitable physiological crashes. My body and mind were in a perpetual cycle of intoxication and exhaustion. However, I was not influenced by drugs or alcohol, I was influenced by other people. My judgement was clouded by persistent strong emotional reactions. My thoughts were entangled in lies and manipulations and projections. I was confused. I felt I was crazy. I felt I could not trust myself. I could not understand whether I was right or wrong, fair or biased, imposing or gaslit. I was enmeshed. I could not see myself separate from another.

It was not until I temporarily isolated myself that the fog began to clear. I needed to distance myself physically from these interactions for some time to regain autonomy over my emotional and mental states, and see the situation for what it was. And although, I could now see the enmeshed, codependent, toxic (as in inflicting real measurable harm on my mental, emotional and physical bodies) and otherwise unhealthy nature of these relationships, I did not see a way out. I was afraid of retaliation, harassment and overt aggression. Afterall, there was a reason I made myself small or big, and I enmeshed - I was protecting myself. There was wisdom in my dysfunction.

These seemingly maladaptive responses to social situations have some interesting parallels with self-defense strategies we are taught when encountering a bear in the wild. I am no hunter, or hiker, or nature enthusiast, but I believe the advice goes along the lines of “If it’s brown, lie down, if it’s black, attack.” In other words, we are told to protect ourselves by making ourselves small in the presence of some bears, and big in response to others. Although there were no bears or lions or wolves in my vicinity, there were people in my life who had no reservations about lying, manipulating, bad-mouthing and distorting the narrative in any other way possible. My unhealthy excessive worry and rumination were in fact a healthy response to an unhealthy environment. My incessant chattering distracted and lulled the scheming minds of others. By enmeshing, I made myself close and similar and, therefore, unthreatening. My nervous system was signaling to flee, but without any escape route in sight, I only edged nearer.   

I did get out eventually. I was betrayed, and then I was discarded. Although a part of me saw it coming and was relieved, it still hurt. I still had a hard time believing and accepting it. And I was enraged. I punched and threw pillows in my bedroom. I cried and screamed (alone in the privacy of my home because society condemns justified anger expressed in response to unjust offenses). And I wrote about some really disturbing violent fantasies in a journal as a way to channel my anger onto paper rather than people. I was quite surprised by how gruesome those images were, and how satisfying it felt to entertain them in my mind. I did not know I was prone to at the very least thinking of such violence. In truth, we are all capable of violence just as much as we are capable of love. We are all criminals, and we are saints. We are all oppressors and saviors. It is not the question of if someone can be violent, but rather it is the question of what it takes them to get there.

Betrayal may have saved me from my entanglements this time, but it did not save me from me. I was still attracted to dysfunctional relationships like a moth to a flame, and I continued to engage in the dance of accommodating and intimidating within those relationships. These were my coping mechanisms, and although it may seem logical to address unhealthy adaptive behaviors directly and attempt to change them – to trade people pleasing for authenticity and self-expression, to replace aggression with compassion and understanding, to train one’s mind to be present and the body to stay calm – the unconscious simply will not allow it. There is danger in being authentic around liars and compassionate around manipulators. There is foolishness in staying put and calm when the body alerts to run. There is no use in setting boundaries where none are respected (more on that later).

What I needed was discernment, and then acceptance. There is already wisdom innate to all of us which guides us through the realities of life, if only one can adequately perceive them. I needed to see people for who they actually were rather than who I hoped they would be. I needed to put an end to rationalizing and emphasizing with their red flags. I needed to stop assuming responsibility for their behavior. I needed to face the darkness in others rather than glossing over it to fit the narrative I was projecting.  

And in order to recognize the monsters around me, I first needed to witness the demons within me.   

happiness is an obstacle to wholeness

“I don’t know how to be happy alone. I have fantasized about being in love. I have chased after men I thought I was in love with. I have had sex with men I hoped would love me. I dated men I thought loved me. Tonight I am alone. No one to talk to. No one to hold me. No one to confide in. No one to understand. Just a glass of wine. Or two. Third one actually. […] How do I learn to be happy alone? How do I wake up in the morning and look forward to the day when there is no one to look forward to seeing or speaking to?”

From My Journal, Day 80

I had actively searched for and chased after love for more than a decade. Despite my relentless efforts, and despite being fairly attractive and interesting (according to others’ opinions), I found myself alone, incapable of tolerating my aloneness sober, and not knowing what to do about it.   

All I had were emotional bruises and scars from dysfunctional relationships and failed attempts at relationships. Clearly, what I had been doing - what I was taught and encouraged to do - was not working. I was at a loss, and the Internet, and expensive self-help courses, and friends, and family, and therapy were not helping. It seemed everyone and everything encouraged me to get out there, to be positive, to be open, to be social, and to build friendships, hobbies, career, finances, muscles, and find a romantic relationship in the process, or to sign up for a dating service and sift through hundreds of men until I find someone who sort of fits (if I polish and lubricate my edges). But I no longer believed in any of that advice, and I did not trust myself.   

I did not trust that I could make a healthy choice. I asked myself in one of my journal entries, “How do I get my life to a place where I am not at risk of settling?” It is necessary to clarify that by “settling” I meant willingly chaining myself to a man who was unsafe – who did not respect and accept me – just so I could feel the validation of having someone by my side or rather being by someone else’s side. At the time, I did not know what it actually meant to feel enough, what it meant to love myself, and what it meant to respect and accept myself. I did not know how to go about it and where to start. All I knew was that I wanted to be able to sit across a table from a man and see him exactly for who he was, and accept or reject him based on that knowing. It sounds rather simple. How else would anyone do it?

The truth is most of us do not see our lovers, nor do we see ourselves. We are unconsciously attracted to the likes of people who hurt us (more often than not a parent we have a more complicated relationship with), and we project a fantasy of what we want to see, which is changed behavior on behalf of said parent, onto a significant other. We form trauma bonds and we call it love, and we get defensive whenever our fantasy attachment is threatened by the slightest hint of reality.   

Although it became evident to me (after many years of disappointment) that no one was coming to rescue me, I still searched for saving someplace else. I believed I would no longer be at risk of settling for the next man to come along if I derived love and fulfillment from within, if I was happy with myself and I was happy with my life, and I was at peace, present and able to enjoy the moment. I placed a lot of emphasis on filling my cup, building myself up, feeling confident and worthy, and finding fulfillment in my work and love in self-care. Whereas previously I looked for happiness, love and fulfillment in a romantic relationship, I now earnestly hoped I could find it all in the life I thought I was building.  

I naively trusted that as long as life was good, I could make good choices.  

I believed I would not be at risk of settling if I was healed. I presumed I could undo the effects of trauma and rid myself of pain if I connected with my inner child, and embraced her with love and tenderness, and provided her support and protection that she lacked. Whereas before I projected an image of a parent onto my partner, I now assumed responsibility of said parental figure, and expected I could heal all my wounds, meet all my needs, and free myself from all my aching desires, and at last make it all OK.

In reality, I needed to accept that it is never all OK, that there are always unmet needs and unfulfilled desires, wounds that ache from time to time, and scars that are distasteful to the eye. I needed to accept that there is no absolute healing or forgetting, that there is always a void, and that sometimes it feels uncomfortable. I needed to accept that there is no parental figure to make it all OK – not a father, not a mother, not a mentor, not a lover, not God, not myself – and there never was, and that is OK.

The truth is it takes years to get to a place where one is not at risk of settling, and that place is not some fairytale land where we are miraculously filled with and healed by love for all, and we become one with everything. It is not a place where we gain superhuman abilities to meet all our needs and free ourselves from all our desires. It is also not a place of intoxicating success in finances, career and business, and unworldly perfection in art and beauty, which take us even further away from reality. Rather, it is a sobering grounding place where we can see our unhealed wounds and unmet needs and aching desires with acceptance. We are not at risk of settling when we are able to tolerate the perceived lack rather than deny it. Only when we can see the void and accept the void without attempting to fill the void, can we have the discernment and wisdom not to settle.  

This knowing is not something that can be taught. It is not enough to recognize it on an intellectual level. It must be experienced. It must be felt rather than conceptualized. It must be trained and built over time and with repetition like a muscle. It is something we simply arrive at after years of daily practice, during which we learn to spend evenings in our own company, to lull ourselves to sleep and greet the morning in solitude and without desperation, to witness our demons without pushing them away, to talk about painful memories without losing ourselves to anger and grief, and to hold space for hope and desire without the urgency, and entitlement, and helplessness of a child.    

I did not need to learn to be happy alone. I needed to become stronger – strong enough to observe reality as it is and see people as they are, strong enough to endure without the compulsive need to numb myself with substances or escape myself by forging fantasy bonds.

For the time being, however, I continued to drink wine and envy those who still managed to get away with unconscious relationships.

sometimes withdrawal feels like affection

“I am obsessed. I am obsessed with a person I don’t even know. […] I created fake Instagram account and Facebook account just to stalk him. I know way too much about him to ever confidently look into his eyes. I crave him so bad. I am so out of control that I continue to get drunk on wine. I’ve been ordering unhealthy takeout, and [… I walked to a convenience store] and got cigarettes because I needed to subside my obsession somehow. I haven’t smoked in a long time.”

From My Journal, Day 109

I was awakened from my daydreaming by a visceral sexual attraction.

I remember sitting several rows behind him and looking at his wide neck and shoulders. There was something primal about his build. His broad muscular frame inspired an image of a caveman, a hunter, a protector. There was something animalistic about my attraction to him. I felt it deep in my bones. My body ached for him.

The attraction was mutual. I saw it in his eyes. But neither of us initiated a conversation. I frequently ran into him, and when I did I froze like a deer in headlights.

I felt extremely anxious. Perhaps, I sensed he was not a safe man. Perhaps, it was due to my learned association between intimacy and danger, which was strongly reinforced by a lifetime of disappointments, pain and trauma. I can say with certainty, however, that we were both emotionally unavailable.

Instead of acting on my feelings and approaching him, I let the quite natural attraction grow into an unnatural obsession. I searched for him everywhere I went. I created fake social media accounts to stalk his. I talked about him incessantly, and when I was not talking or stalking, I was fantasizing.

I craved him, although I did not know him. I had never heard his voice, felt his touch, smelled or tasted him. Yet, I craved him. It was all a figment of my imagination. I quenched my cravings with wine and unhealthy takeout. And it is no coincidence that some years after quitting smoking, I once again lit up a cigarette, which then led to more cravings and another obsession.

I smoked cigarettes when I was younger. I hated it. I hated the smell of it. I hated the taste of it. I hated how it instantly made me fatigued and anxious. I was filled with hatred towards the habit and shame about myself. Yet, I vividly remember feeling that nothing could compare to the high of nicotine. Nothing felt enjoyable without a cigarette. Life felt empty. I attempted to quit many times and, like many, failed. And I remember thinking that I would be able to quit smoking if only I had a boyfriend. I figured I could fill the void with another person. Afterall, is it not what we all do? Do we not, consciously and unconsciously, fill the voids in our lives and our hearts with people around us?

I did quit smoking eventually. That was a year or so into my relationship. I replaced the habit of smoking with a relationship and a new obsession, I mean hobby, which was running. Nicotine, sex, love and running have more in common than it appears – all four induce a strong intoxicating physiological response in a relatively short timeframe.  

One may argue that unlike cigarettes, sex, relationships and exercise are healthy. Relationships and fitness, as well as nutrition, are not only some of the most common objects of obsession, but also widely celebrated and encouraged sources of mental preoccupation, distraction, avoidance and addiction. It is what nature intended afterall – to encourage us to sleep, eat, move and fornicate. These rather natural activities flood our brain receptors with feel-good chemicals to ensure our genes are passed on.

The cultural fixation on relational and physical health also gives us an illusion of control. On some level, we believe that by managing our relationships we can avoid facing ourselves and evade confronting our own inadequacies. We believe that by sculpting our body we can shape the perceptions of others. We believe that by subscribing to a rigid diet or sleep regimen or a ritual of activities with questionable practical utility, we can outsmart aging and death. Or we simply distract ourselves. I was most strict with my diet during the months leading up to the breakup. It was much easier to cry over the fact that I could not have cake than admit that there was no sweetness in my relationship.

Nonetheless, I found myself single again. I was lonely. I was injured from running. And I was smoking.

At last, I came face to face with my inner monsters. Now that I was no longer channeling my compulsive, obsessive and addictive tendencies into more socially acceptable pursuits, i.e., a relationship and healthy lifestyle habits, my dysfunctional patterns became so evident I could no longer ignore them… or blame someone else for them.  

In truth, the crush was not an object of my affection. The crush was a trigger. The crush was not a source of my overwhelmingly strong feelings, cravings and aching. I was.

As usual, I was chasing the high. I wanted to feel good. I needed to fill the void. I never felt wholly safe and at peace in the presence of another person to begin with, and I most certainly was not able to let anyone near me (and rightfully so) shortly after the breakup. Thus, the obsession with a person I had not as much as spoken to served as a surrogate for connection, affection and intimacy. And when that was not enough, I turned to nicotine.  

My nervous system was highly dysregulated. The pain of being alone, and the even greater pain of now beginning to see my past relationships more clearly compounded with adverse effects of my bad habits took me on a wild emotional rollercoaster ride.

I did not know the skills to ground and soothe myself. I did not have the strength to hold space for my inner experiences. It was unbearable to drop into the present moment and stay there. Awareness overwhelmed and sickened me. So, I resorted to stalking, drinking and smoking in an attempt to numb and escape from my pain.

One may wonder why I did not ask for help. In therapy, I was encouraged to seek healing in relationships that were dysfunctional. I wasted hundreds of dollars on self-help courses that promised the healing power of self-love in as little as thirty days. Some close to me reveled in my unraveling and further fueled my obsession with the crush, and others simply were not strong enough to witness and be present with my pain.

I did ask for help. And in the process, I was misled, I was deceived, and my experiences were – mostly unintentionally – invalidated.

It is challenging to find healing in a sick society. It is nearly impossible to be seen by those who are too afraid to see themselves.

Thus, without anyone to rescue me from myself, I plunged deep into the rabbit hole of compulsion, obsession, and addiction.