17.03.2024
I’ve been trying to write something for two weeks now, but have just continued to stare at a blank screen. It’s something that usually comes so easily to me when I’m struggling. Maybe it’s because it’s homework now. I started seeing my councilor again, thus far homework has been journaling and vocalizing my feelings… I haven’t been doing a very good job at either.
I experienced one of the most terrifying nights of my life a couple weeks ago. When I woke up the next day I was shocked, I don’t know what made him change his mind, and I didn’t know I felt about it either way. For days it haunted me, every time I closed my eyes I relived it… but as the days wore on and I took the steps that I had to, the terror started to subside but the ache of absence took its place.
There’s a few things I’ve learned that are important to me in recent weeks. While I will probably never open up completely and let anyone know my darkest fears and experiences, I do have to talk about something during these sessions… the one person I may have told doesn’t care for the details.
I want to be loved. I want to be respected. I want to be desired. I want to feel safe… but maybe more than anything I want to be seen. Not seen for what I can offer people, but for who I am at my core. I felt like maybe I had this for a minute, and the loss of it has left a chasm in the center of my chest.
I don’t know that we would have ever been more, but I had someone in my life that I thought was going to hold a special place in my life.. and honestly he probably always will, just not in the capacity I had originally thought.
It wasn’t one event that changed things, it was weeks that led into months until I couldn’t remember the last real conversation we had. Good morning, I’m proud of you. Hope you had a good day. Repeat. Everything became surface level. He told me he hated surface level.
There were no longer open ended questions, and on the rare occasion that they came I was afraid to answer, I came to expect the silence that followed. How and when did I become so dispensable? What did I do? I can definitely speculate, but knowing that I wasn’t worth the conversation… I did attempt the questions… Where are we? Where are you? I wish I could see your face so that I could understand…. crickets.
Losing someone that you care so much about while you’re at your lowest is a special sort of torture. To know the person you want to talk to the most isnt there… or worse yet, they are there but not in a meaningful way. You cling to whatever you can… how they told you they wanted to fix things when you tried to protect yourself the last time… how they told you they werent going anywhere when you tried to push them away… the times they told you that you undervalued your place in their life… you cling to the hope.
But eventually the other words leak in… your paying attention to my words and not listening to my actions. I’m listening to your actions now. I’m listening to the silence. I’m listening to the way I’ve adjusted so that I only read messages on social media a couple times a week because it hurts to be so blatantly ignored. I’m listening to the fact 95% of the time you ask me a question or I tell you anything real that it will be met by silence or some generic response. I’m opening old wounds and remembering when during a week you couldn’t find an hour to see me… I’m reading between the lines of what should have been so obvious to me all along.
I’m starting to sound like I’m needy, I’m really not. We use to spend twenty minutes at the end of our day talking, but it was real and it was meaningful. I don’t need anyone to hold my hand, or check in ten times a day.. I’m capable of carrying my own weight. I’m just saying that when the messages become fewer and fewer, when the good mornings come later and the emoji’s attached disappear, when the feelings and the support fade away it creates a deep ache.
It finally broke me, it was over nothing major that tipped me over the edge. How was your day? I answered, no reply. If he had answered I might have told him about my first real conversation with T since I asked him to leave. It didn’t go well. The girls group chat was going strong, I checked to see what the hype was, which just confirmed that I was once again ignored. That he didn’t actually care how my day was. You are not worth the time.
I’m not proud of how I reacted, I didn’t use my words or vocalize my feelings, one emoji and shut down. What’s the point in the conversation? If he wanted to, he would. It’s really what it boils down to. I can be sad that that’s where we are. I can be hurt that I didnt mean the same to him and what he did to me. I can wish that he could have told me… but I cant be mad at him for how he feels. I wont beg anyone to care about me.
I think some people in this world are just meant to be alone. I’m really not alone, I have a lot of people in my life… most of them get the part of me that I allow them to see and the rest are interested in what I can offer them. Even when you’re surrounded be people you can still feel so very lonely. As much as I want to feel seen I dont know that I will ever open myself up again to the hurt that comes with it.
I don’t know where we go next. I know that he’s going through a hard time too… it’s why I let it go for so long. But the fact is that I’d show up in a heartbeat for him. Where he doesnt care the details of what I went through, I want to know and understand so that I can know how to be there for him, how to support him. No matter where I am and what I’m going through I still care deeply. I hate thinking about not being there on the off chance he reaches out and actually lets me in.
Do I continue to walk into the wall and eat the hurt that comes with it? Do I stop disillusioning myself into thinking that it even matters if I’m there or not?
I dont know… I just need a minute to let myself grieve the loss, to build the walls back up… to put the mask back in place, it had felt so freeing for a minute to have somewhere safe to lay it down.
For now I’m just going to take a minute… one step, one moment at a time.