*** Something I wrote after my break-up with my ex-boyfriend. I initially wrote it on 05/24/14. But I decided to post it now ***
My biggest fear use to be that I would die alone. It’s not my biggest fear anymore. I think I have accepted that this may be my future. There are no violins. This isn't a blog entry of me accepting the circumstances of my pity party, but a realization. A realization that I feel in the pit of my stomach.
When I was 12 years old, my mother became a live in nurse.
She worked in Key Largo, which was about 2 hours from where we lived. She would
only come home on the weekends. And she worked there until I was 18 years old.
Since my brother was too young to take care of himself, my mother took him with
her. When I was about 15 years old my sister moved out. There were plenty nights
were I was home alone in a 4 bedroom house. I remember how scared I would get
if I heard a noise, and I would just lay in my bed praying throughout the
night.
During that time, I can’t remember feeling lonely. However,
after college loneliness would be a feeling that I would be all too familiar with.
It use to sit in my stomach, and grew as my anxiety intensified. After college,
life became a mess of intensified religious practices, self-doubt and an unsatisfied desire to be accepted. Discovering. Learning. Lonely. I remember when I rented
my first one bedroom apartment after moving to the DC area for my job. I would wake up in
the middle of the night and have panic attacks. I was more than a thousand
miles away from my family. My family that was used to growing and living life
without me. And while the obvious resolution would be for me just to move back
home... it’s not that simple. Distance does more than create loneliness. It
also creates differences. And most of the time I am visiting I dread it. Why?
That is another story all together. But after my mother died, the family fell
apart.
I think back at all my relationships and wonder, will there
ever be anyone that I can’t live without? Or that one person who needs me in
their life? A part of me is happy for the strained relationships in my life
because distance means you can’t hurt me. Distance means I am free from the
burdens of socialization. I remember a conversation I had with my ex-boyfriend
walking through a park. I told him that I don't feel as if any man can every truly love me. I know
that sounds bad. I know how it sounds. But its how I feel. I don’t think a
husband and children are in my future. I am not sure if I even want it anymore.
Some would say, your still young… you have time. Yeah, yeah.
Ever since I was young I knew that I wouldn't be that girl. I wouldn't be that girl who would receive that kind of love. And all my adulthood attempts to imitate
that love was forced. Because in the pit of my stomach that feeling would
reemerge and it would remind me, what I am and what my life is supposed to be
like. No one will ever love you. So I had to start loving myself.
There have been two good things that have come from this… I
am stronger. I don’t hate myself anymore. I've accepted who I am. The second thing
is that I don’t feel that fear in the pit of my stomach because I accepted that
gut feeling.
Dependency is such a crippling thing. Losing yourself when
you become close to someone. Someone that you can’t control. Someone that you
can never truly understand.
I wish I could see the world from a surface level and have a
more ingenuous outlook. But I am plagued. This may be a moment of insecurities overtaking me, but I need to be real. There are women who never get married and never have children. If this happens to me, I don't want to be miserable. I want it to liberate me.
