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.