My awesome barber/hair stylist and friend is leaving the area. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear. She recommended another person but…it’s not the same. I feel myself wanting to pull away and just let go completely. I don’t want to say goodbye. I don’t want to learn someone else. It’s hard not to feel abandoned when this keeps happening to me with trusted people like therapists and hair people.
I feel like abandonment is a much bigger theme in my life than I previously realized. That makes me sad. I thought I didn’t care about that at all. i was independent, so come or go, I don’t need you. Everything is different now, though.
After therapy, after being completely open with my wife, after letting the trauma and pain out of me like the bugs that fly out of the Mummy’s mouth in that movie from way too long ago. It seems like all that independence was actually me pushing away this fear of abandonment. It was me hiding from people leaving me. It was me not even wanting to think about how much I was hurting from the very real abandonment I was dealing with.
But what is it called if it’s not actual physical abandonment? What if it’s just emotional? What if the people you counted on the most just shut you out emotionally whenever it suited them? But it happens so often that you just learn that they aren’t really there when you need them. And so you learn to just count on yourself, but you’re always looking over your shoulder, hoping that they might come back to you one day.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this fear since it emerged pretty intensely a couple of weeks ago. The situation wasn’t that big of a deal, but the result of this realization is huge. Like I find myself reexamining all these parts of my life where I felt so alone and it hurt like nothing I had ever felt before. I was made to feel like I was overly sensitive and there was something wrong with me. I was always told that I was the problem, with no one acknowledging how much they hurt me.
I still feel this need to pull away from everyone some times. When this thing about me gets triggered, it makes me want to hide and be completely alone again, because that was comfortable after so many years of needing to be by myself. I wish I could go back and time and teach myself how to handle it and how to stay tough and not let it destroy me like it has. I wish that I didn’t need the ones closest to me to constantly prove that they aren’t going anywhere. And most of all, I wish that I could learn that it was never my fault. That I don’t need to accept responsibility for all of what happened to me that was outside of my control.
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