A Broken Frame

Here I am again. As many times as I have had to say goodbye due to moving around and having so easy to fall in love, it´s not strange that I feel like an expert on closure. But the pain is the same, the questions are the same, the yearning and the little clump of something uneasy is still the same. The only thing that has changed over the years is Thank The Universe, are my actions. I used to just suppress everything I felt and not really show it to anyone but maybe one closest friend. I´m much better at playing the whole I´m fine routine while my eyes betray me that that is far from the case. But now one of my newer defense strategies is rationalization so here comes the ramble about the break up..

According to The Attachment Theory, I´m the Avoidant type.
Yes, when I was growing up I learned to shut the fuck up and be nice or I would be beaten into pieces. That was the dysfunctional life behind the theatrical scenes of my family. My dad was drinking and hitting mum and mum was hitting me and my big sister. I spend my first years of life in the cacophony of shouting and the sound of things smashing, like a hand against a face. So trust me, I learned how be a good girl, even though that didn´t help when your mum is more of the ambivalent/anxious type, giving you love one minute and then kicking you in the ass, the next.

So all my first romantic feelings were typical for the avoidant types. Unavailable characters from books, unavailable people that hardly would notice the little adolescent girl staring their way. I was really persistent though. The whole love at a distance suited me very well for a long time. And for a long time I mean until now. Before this latest relationship, my previous and only relationship was with my first boyfriend at the tender age of 15. How I managed to end up in that relationship I have to thank the teenage hormones. But as the hormones, it didn´t last long and I broke it off when I felt it was getting in the way of where I wanted to develop. Please notice this part.

After that I was single for 7 years, having short love affairs and longing for things that would not happen because I sabotaged it all by either choosing the wrong guy from the beginning or sabotaging during the dating. Therefore I was only falling in love with people out of town, living in another country, in relationships, etc. I could spent hours having escapist fantasies of how everything would be good only if that person would be mine.

Each time it didn´t work out I would hide everything within me and dwell on the things lost and escaping in a various ways. Or as DM frankly sings: ”Pain and misery always hit the spot. Knowing you can’t lose what you haven’t got”. And yes, you could consider the fact that I´m only 27 and I´m just learning through trial and error, so there is nothing wrong with it. But hey at the same time there are people much younger than me that get it right so I strongly believe in the attachment theory. By going through the research it feels sometimes like I´m just reading about myself or the people I´ve met.
So here it goes, I´ve been avoidant of emotional pain in every way that they describe the avoidant type to be. Expressing feelings was never my strongest point not even in front of my dearest friends. My feelings could only come out in my head or in encrypted writings, letting me be an emotional cutter by going through it over and over again, making me feel that it was really love. Because when it hurt it meant it was love. And that is still one of the most fault things I´ve learned during my childhood. That love hurts. And I still notice how I fall back to that notion and have to remind myself that it´s not right.

What have happened in the latest couple years is that I´ve meet some people and ended up in situations that have forced me to be open and confronting with my feelings like never before. This first real adult relationship since my teenage one has learned me more about myself than any previous distant ”loves”. This is love and so it is hard to look back and recognize the ways I´ve been sometimes untrue and avoidant. I have always described myself as a cat coming and going as I wish, and that is true, making it so bad to end up with a person who requires and deserves so much more. For every investment I did in the relationship, I didn´t accept them and felt them as constraints wrapping around me. I kept pushing beyond my comfort zones, it felt so ironic that the least family friendly person with no desire to drink and eat meat would end up living the family life, learning to drink and how to prepare meat.

And then there were moments of me trying to escape…I jumped in to early, I haven´t dealt with the past, I haven´t even dealt with myself, how could I ever think that suddenly it all be would be OK with a person in total different period of life?
And then came my moments of not dealing with stress, last time I tried to break up was based on me not being happy with my life, feeling like I was postponing myself and instead working on a job that I hated not even close to starting on my path that I felt was right. So I did as I always do, I changed my whole life at once, also meaning breaking up with this relationship. But I had put the critical glasses on to soon and I do it to often when I´m stressed. Like this time. I´ve been stressed about the full time studies, almost full time night job and trying do something that meant a lot in my life and is just gonna take more and more of my time. So what do I do? I put on my critical glasses and nothing is then right. And I bicker in a passive aggressive ways or I´m just mentally not there. Damn it.

Even if in the end we know that this is right for us both because we really did try both to adapt to each other ways…Aki has once again chosen someone that from the beginning was not really suitable even if it´s love. I know one thing is true. That love is also about timing. And once again I´ve calculated it all wrong, how would I time my hectic life of the 30s with a man getting in his middle age wanting calm family life? Either way, I learned a lot the hard way in this relationship and all I can do is be thankful for this experience, and be better because of it.

Once I wished that I loved somebody truly. I did and it bit me back.

Then I wished that somebody would love me truly. He did and it bit us back.

Now I wish to love myself truly so that I can pass it on truly.

aki