by Anonymous
When I fell in love, I couldn’t stop crying. I lay on my bedroom floor sobbing for hours. Something hurt deep inside me. My therapist asked me to draw it.
I knew exactly what it looked like. It was a tornado made of deep, dark blues and purples. A gradient of sorrow. I hovered above it, looking into its abyss from the very top. It touched down at the base of my stomach, and as it swirled, it collapsed my organs, my throat, my entire body. My teeth chattered. It felt like I was dying.
Why was I having such a terrible reaction to something that was supposed to be so beautiful?
The thing is, it was beautiful. She was beautiful. We were beautiful.
When I fell in love, I couldn’t stop crying. I lay on my bedroom floor sobbing for hours. Something hurt deep inside me. My therapist asked me to draw it.
We met at the beginning of junior year. In the bustle of mid-August move-in, our mutual best friend, M, introduced us—they had gotten to know each other when they were both living in Philly that past summer. I was sitting on the floor of my new apartment assembling plastic IKEA chairs, trying to use a screwdriver, when she walked through my front door wearing a white sports bra and black leggings. She brought me an iced almond milk latte from Starbucks, the first of many coffees. (Our morning routine would come to revolve around Avril 50, the eclectic coffee, magazine, and tobacco shop on Sansom and 34th. Its owner, John, became an integral character in our relationship, silently following the plotline from behind his yellowing cash register and thick-rimmed glasses. His close-lipped smile said it all).
She sat down cross-legged on the white rug, asking M about her boy drama. I wasn’t usually shy, but she made me nervous.
Three days later, we danced under red and green fluorescent lights downtown at Pulse. I was surprised when she asked me to take a shot with her—I was still unsure whether or not she even liked me as a friend. When the tequila hit our throats, the energy shifted. She moved closer to me on the dance floor. I grabbed her hands. When I made eye contact with M, I mouthed, “Is she flirting with me???”
It turns out, she was. Moments later she leaned forward and kissed me. I was quite pleasantly surprised. She was confident, making a move in the middle of a crowded frat-hosted party surrounded by familiar faces. Little did I know that she wasn’t out yet. No one at that party knew about her sexuality, but she kissed me anyway. And I kissed her back.
I was new to the gay scene, too. I always knew that I was attracted to girls, but most of my college social life up to that point had revolved around Greek life—an obviously heteronormative, and homophobic, environment (Funnily enough, the first girl I kissed in college was in my pledge class). For a second, I thought about what people would think when they saw us on that dance floor. But our bubble of excitement, of enchantment, protected us. I didn’t care.
We started dating soon after. I knew I loved her because I never hesitated, not once. I told her only two weeks after we met. I didn’t mean to, but it was the best accident; I didn’t even care when she didn’t say it back, because she didn’t have to. My love for her was instinctual. I was finally able to exercise a muscle I always knew I had. Being in her arms was not enough, I wanted to climb inside her heart.
I was, and am, a lover. She was my love.
It was clear how much she loved me; I never doubted that. But at any sign of unrequitedness—a text unanswered, an excitement unreciprocated—the tornado touched down. I was so angry with myself. I felt like I was ruining our relationship with my anxiety. I couldn’t find a solution—I was out of control.
I knew I loved her because I never hesitated, not once.
My first therapist introduced me to the word “perfectionist” when I was 10 years old. “You’re a capital ‘P’,” she would say. That word resonated with me, giving me language to identify the thought processes that had governed my young life. If I held myself to an unachievable standard, I thought, maybe my dad would spend more time at home—with me. If he didn’t leave so often, I wouldn’t miss him so much. It sounded so simple. I knew he wanted to spend time with me, too. It confused me, the way he said he had to go. He was doing important work, people told me. I couldn’t do much but accept it. I felt guilty for questioning him.
I was scared of losing my father from a young age. It was clear in the questions I asked my mother when she got off a serious phone call: “Did Daddy die?” I would ask.
And one day, she answered, “Yes.”
I was 10 years old when my worst fear came true. My father died of an asthma attack while on a reporting assignment in Syria. His death came after many close calls. In 2002, he was shot in the back by an Israeli sniper in the West Bank. In 2011, ten months before he died, he was kidnapped with three other journalists in Libya. I knew he worried, too. I remember a Skype call not long before his death. He told me that he was going somewhere, and he couldn’t talk for a few days. I forget exactly where, probably Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon, or some other hotspot in the Middle East. Suddenly, I was anxious, and I said the words I never had aloud. “Daddy, I don’t want you to die.” I didn’t know it at the time, but I was asking him, in the only way I could, not to put his life in danger. I was asking him to stay, to be a father.
Instead of reassuring me, he said, “Kiddo, don’t talk like that.”
I grieved his loss before he died. And I grieved my relationship before it ended.
In fact, I think that was part of the reason it ended. I had trouble distinguishing between what I needed from my partner, what I needed from my father, and what I needed from myself. I always felt like I was asking for too much.
I had a conversation with a friend the other day who helped me understand why I was grieving.
“This is the second largest loss of your life,” he said. “The first was your father.”
It clicked for me. I was losing the second love of my life. My body was running through the same mechanisms it had ten years ago. It felt familiar, but worlds different. And the worst part was that I was in control of this loss. I chose to let her go.
“One day you’ll recognize how big of a task it is for someone to try to fill that hole your father left,” he continued. “Very few people will be able to.”
I’ve spent most of my life trying to find meaning in my father’s death, and in his life. I’m always trying to dig deeper, get to the next understanding of life and self. I see life as an infinite series of levels stacked on top of each other. Each series is curated for our own journey, personalized to the circumstances we were born into, and the key to the next level is overcoming a new challenge, each more difficult than the previous, which unlocks a new area of introspection. This helps me understand grief as part of this journey. Everyone has a challenge. Mine is this fear of loss, it is an anxiety that finds me wherever I go.
I have tried the medications, the therapies, the journaling, but something doesn’t click.
I don’t want to bandage the discomfort with short-term remedies anymore. I want to face this head on, like an internal episode of Fear Factor.
It clicked for me. I was losing the second love of my life. My body was running through the same mechanisms it had ten years ago. It felt familiar, but worlds different. And the worst part was that I was in control of this loss. I chose to let her go.
****
I love answers. I love solutions. I love fixing problems. I run through lists in my head throughout the day, ranking my anxieties from most to least pressing. I need to figure this out. I call my mom, I talk to fifteen of my closest friends, I try writing. Sometimes I overshare with strangers just to see if they can offer a new, objective perspective. I imagine a wise one-liner from the old woman sitting next to me on the train clicking, being the puzzle piece I needed to just be. To finally sit still in my body and my mind. There, I did it. I understand this now. This is what I need to do to be happy, to be smart, to be loved. I’ve never been afraid to challenge myself. If there is an opportunity for self-growth I will take it in a heartbeat, no matter how dramatic.
I have gone cold turkey on my anxiety meds three separate times. One summer I bought a flip phone and fell off the grid for two months. I barely talked to anyone, a huge feat for an extrovert like myself. When I make decisions, they are usually extreme, and extremely justified (in my mind). It is a blessing and a curse.
Shortly after my breakup, Meg came into my life. She was also a member of the dead-dad club. Her own father had passed only a few years before mine—similarly suddenly and tragically. We were both still trying to heal, feeling the effects of our childhood trauma in our newly adult lives. We shared a fundamental grief that informed our relationships, a grief that changed shape and meaning as we grew. We both questioned how to make sense of it all, and how to heal in a world that kept on moving.
While she didn’t participate herself, Meg took an interest in psychedelics as a method for healing. Over the past summer, she worked at a ketamine-assisted psychotherapy clinic. These therapy sessions were about four to five hours long and participants were administered a legal dose of the drug in a controlled environment. The majority of the session was spent in a dissociative state, as Meg described it, where one is detached from their physical pain and environment. Here is where people could confront their darkest demons, or, perhaps, their internal tornados.
Meg wanted to lead her own guided session.
I was the perfect candidate.
Naturally, I was nervous, as anyone should be when thinking about using drugs, but I saw the opportunity to try ketamine in a safe and loving environment as my next challenge. I had read stories about people’s journeys unlocking new parts of their brain, breaking through layers of trauma they couldn’t access in traditional therapy. I wanted to see what was in the crevices of my subconscious. I wanted an excuse to think about my father, my breakup, and try to fix my fear of loss. What would I find out about myself?
On a Friday at noon, I found myself following through with this plan in the basement of my best friend, C’s, house. He was also thinking about loss—a friend of his had recently lost her father. He wanted to reflect on how to support her, and gain empathy for the weight of her grief. I felt lucky to have Meg guiding me. It was this connection that made the experience feel spiritual. Meant to be, even.
We set up makeshift beds on the plush carpet, turned off the lights, and lit fall scented candles. Before we began, we reflected on and wrote about three things: 1) What are you hard on yourself about? 2) What words do you associate with loss? 3) What are you grateful for?
- I have been hard on myself for a long time. I am never doing enough. I am not a good enough friend, daughter, sister, person. I am not smart enough. I am too much. I am too needy. I am too anxious. I push people away because I want more from them than they can give me.
- Grief. Panic. Existential crisis/threat. Anxiety. Guilt. Tightness. Heat. Appreciation. Confusion. Defeat. Love. I wanted more____(time? love?).
- Family. Friends. School. Success. Passion. Strength. Depth. Resilience. Introspection. Love. Life. Present. Future. My personal legend.
I sat next to the coffee table and looked at the ketamine—it wasn’t as much as I had expected, filling probably one-fifth of the dime bag. The powder was less like the baking soda consistency of cocaine and more like the tiny glass crystals you would see sprinkled about department store Christmas displays. It was… pretty. Sparkly, even.
I opened the plastic seal and poured half of the powder onto a small brass plate decorated with green and gold. In the center, a woman wore a halo with a crucifix inside, surrounded by four smaller men. I used my pinky finger to divide the pile into two neat, thick lines on either side of her head, careful not to waste one precious molecule.
I laughed before asking, “Does anyone have a dollar bill?” Trashy, I know, but that was the most effective method I could think of.
C took one out of his wallet and I rolled it into a tight tube.
“Are you ready?” He asked. I nodded. My heart started thumping as I bent over the plate.
I plugged my left nostril with my index finger and watched the crystals disappear up the dollar bill and into my nose. I lifted my head back and snorted again. It felt scandalous.
I lay back on the pillows and pulled the weighted blanket over my chest. The post nasal drip tasted like burnt plastic. I tried swallowing it down my throat but that only made it worse. I was soon distracted by a heartbeat that could have powered a small city. C suggested we do a guided breathing exercise before he took his dose. My first few breaths were shaky, shallow. I put one hand over my heart, the other on my stomach and focused on a soothing male voice.
“In two, three, four. Out two, three, four…”
When it was over, I looked down at my hands and moved my fingers toward my face, but they didn’t look, or feel, like my own. They were paler, papery, translucent. The ceiling swayed high above my head and I began slipping behind my eyelids.
“Meg?” I asked. “Can you cover my eyes?”
She pulled out the blue and white handkerchiefs that belonged to her father, placing them gently on our faces. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed, but the world went dark. I took deep breaths and let my body sink into numbness. My mind was dreaming, but I was awake.
In the darkness, I tried to conjure my father. I tried picturing his face, hearing his voice, remembering childhood memories. Anything and everything. I wanted to reach him somehow. I thought he would be the key. Maybe he could give me the poignant one-liner, the life changing advice that saved me from myself. I wanted him to tell me that I was okay, and that he was sorry for leaving. But he wasn’t there. I felt frustrated, panicked. What was the point of this if I didn’t get an answer? If I didn’t get closer to the solution?
I waded through the black, looking under the cushions and around the corners of my mind. The exasperation was a familiar feeling. I felt it with her, my girlfriend, when I poured my heart out to ears that couldn’t hear me, remembering the way she wouldn’t react to my desperate pleas for her to change, to love me more, to love me differently. If she could just give me what I needed, I thought, everything would be okay. And if she couldn’t give me what I needed, I would change myself instead. I would stop wanting to be loved in the ways that I wanted. I would accept what she could give me.
I remembered how I convinced myself that I had an anxious attachment style. I became obsessed, thinking that having the vocabulary to name my unhappiness would help me change it somehow. I bought Amir Levine and Rachel Heller’s Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—And Keep—Love. I read up on the three categories of attachment styles, anxious, avoidant, and secure. Secure was the style we should all try to achieve, and 50 percent of people already had! Apparently, the other 50 percent was split between 25 percent of people afflicted by an anxious attachment style, and another 25 percent by avoidant. Even worse, people with anxious attachment styles often find avoidant partners, and vice versa. Everything made sense now! I was so excited to tell her that I figured it out—I was anxious and she was avoidant—and now we could spend time reading the book together and unpacking our epiphanies to improve our relationship.
She didn’t like being diagnosed with an avoidant attachment style. And she didn’t have any interest in reading the book.
In hindsight, Attached is a bunch of BS catered toward people like me—anxious to fix, susceptible to advice, willing to change, even if they don’t know how to change, for those they love. Anxiety and avoidance are not baggage one brings to a relationship, they are feelings based on circumstances created by both parties. Labeling oneself as avoidant or anxious takes on a personal burden that should be shared. Relationships are a two-way street. The one thing I did agree with in the book was the advice to find a partner that can fulfill your needs. That, they write, is the way to “heal” your attachment style.
She was not going to be that person.
I thought, and then said aloud, in a voice I hardly recognized as my own, “I am overwhelmed by the things I cannot fix.”
So, with Meg and C by my side, I let go of the pursuit. I let the darkness take my consciousness. It escaped and ran from me in every direction. I couldn’t catch it. I couldn’t keep it safe or contained or controlled. I felt uncomfortable. And then I felt free.
I wasn’t sad or happy or anxious or relaxed or lost or found. I wasn’t on one extreme end of a spectrum. I just was. I felt freedom in letting go of the control I thought I had. My mind unwound from the coils I had twisted long ago. The heat of panic became loving warmth.
I remembered my ten-year-old self, sitting on the bathroom floor wrapped in a blanket after learning that my father died. I can still picture the white tile I curled myself over. It was cold, but I was hot, panicking, trying to comprehend the fact that I was living in the after. The before was only minutes away, but unequivocally and irreversibly gone.
“Who is going to teach me Arabic?” I asked my mother. “Who is going to take me to the lake house?”
What I was really asking: “How do we fix this? How do we do everything we can to keep life normal? Can everything else stay the same?”
Normalcy meant stability and loss meant change.
I think at that moment I promised myself that I would do whatever it took to never lose someone again. If I couldn’t fix the reality, I would fix myself. I would make everyone happy so that they wouldn’t leave. And if they didn’t leave, I would never have to feel this again.
I carried this mentality with me into my relationship, and it absolutely broke me. I tried so hard to fix myself that I lost myself. I spent so much time questioning the way I loved and wanted to be loved. But that was okay, because if I figured it out, she wouldn’t leave me. If I fixed myself, we would be happy. I could fix it. I could fix it because I didn’t have any other option.
Now suddenly, in this darkness, I did have another option. I was enough.
I saw myself as a ball of energy, connected to others by hundreds of wires. But I had a limited supply, and I couldn’t give it all to everyone. I had to choose wisely. I also had to choose those who could replenish my own supply of energy, so my light wouldn’t go dark. Not every connection deserved the same amount of energy, or any at all. And that was okay.
I pictured the people I love the most, and I smiled. I pictured all of the connections I had made in my life on the other side of those wires. I thought about how some of those wires had fallen off and left holes in their place. Some left larger holes than others, and some left holes could never be filled. I carried each of those losses with me. That was loss, that was change, but it felt okay.
The cyclical nature of loss became clear. There was nothing to fix, only to accept.
And then the question became, how can I fill my own cup? How can I give myself everything I look for in others?
****
In the following weeks, I made a conscious effort to choose wisely. I prioritized those I didn’t question myself around, and in between those interactions, I prioritized myself.
I lost her, and I felt it. Her shadow loomed over my day to day—our mutual friend group, our favorite spots on campus, my coffee order. But I didn’t try to fix it, because there was nothing to fix. I moved forward, existing in a new space with different connections, letting my sadness just be.
It was interesting then, how after I let go, she made her way back to me.
Slowly, we began existing together in the same room, the same party, the same dinner. The anxiety of running into each other turned into excitement. The anger around our breakup melted away. It was confusing at times, because the love never left. Did this mean we should get back together?
We needed to have a conversation.
On a Monday night, she invited me to her house. She led me up two flights of stairs to her bedroom. I recognized the red and white candle on her glass coffee table. We made it together at Paddywax last fall. Mine sat on my bedside table, unlit for months.
We sat on her bed cross-legged facing each other.
“Hi,” I giggled.
She smiled back. “Hi.”
“Do you want to start?” I asked.
“Yes.”
She paused and looked away like she always did when trying to find her words.
“I feel like I need to be honest. I-I’m not in the place to-I.”
“Tell me, it’s okay.”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t think we should be in a relationship right now.”
I was relieved. “I agree.”
We spoke honestly with each other, perhaps more honestly than we ever did when we were together. We told each other how much we loved each other, but realized that it was not enough to sustain a relationship. We hugged and kissed and laughed and cried.
“I’m sorry for not making you feel like my priority,” she said, the apology I never thought I would hear. I wasn’t crazy. It wasn’t all in my head.
“Thank you,” I grabbed her hands and squeezed them. “Thank you.”
****
Life is characterized by the befores and afters. Afters are afters because of change, and there is always loss in change. Some afters are happier than others—weddings, graduations, births—but they are still moments that ask you to leave the life you know for one unknown. Loss is inevitable, as is grief, but growth is not. Growth is something you choose. It is what characterizes change and loss. It is using those moments not to look outward, but inward, as that is the introspection that will inform your after.
My father’s death was a before and after, my breakup was a before and after, taking ketamine on a Friday at noon was a before and after, and from each I grew. These experiences built upon each other, unlocking new levels of life and self.
Life would have unfolded whether or not I was ready for it, no matter the strength of my illusion of control, or the tools I wielded to “fix.” What I could, and can, control is not my reality, but my growth.
Everyone has a challenge. Mine are ever evolving, like me.
