I’m feeling, strange. Hot Girl Summer is in full effect. My sacral chakra is so overactive it could compete in the olympics. That being said, I’m taking stock of my relationship with relationships in a new way.
I’m noticing I don’t like having too many “hoes,” but also notice hesitation at one off hook-ups. Exploring sex with women is interesting because I’m constantly nervous that I’m taking advantage of them or leading them on. I have little to no interest in hooking up with men I don’t know. I have only one man in my rotation and I’m feeling myself becoming inclined to develop feelings for him even though we barely know each other and mostly just have sex, don’t even hang out and seemingly have none of the same interests.
I want to be wanted. I’m not ready to belong to someone. But I want someone to be my go to. Maybe I just need a new best friend honestly. I still think about my ex a lot. We’re…friendly now. It’s been fine but I also feel like he doesn’t know how to say he doesn’t care much to be friends with me. I don’t know why I do, I guess because he’s been an important person in my life and we had a strong connection.
But a lot of the things that attracted me to him were things about my past I had not let go of because I believed they defined me, many of them associated with my deep depression in high school and inclination toward punk. He practiced what should’ve been an alarming number of habits that felt familiar to me and so made me feel safe at that time in my life, but in a way that was different and interesting to me. So I felt both at home and intrigued. But the habits I had when I was deeply depressed stunted me and perpetuated my illness. And they did the same for him. And I became very depressed while we were together.
It’s not his fault. I had this idea that I had overcome my depression. Then I contended that okay, maybe I have seasonal depression. Now I’ve admitted to myself that I am a depressive person. I didn’t understand it because I know how happy, positive and optimistic I can be, especially around others. But being now in one of the happiest eras of my life in a long long time, and depression still visiting me in the night without reason and lingering for days, I know I have perpetual healing to undergo. I will always. I can’t think of a happy time in my life where depression did not slip over me this way.
All this to say, it obviously affects all of my relationships. Of course it is just one of many side effects of experiencing decades worth of emotional trauma from growing up in a cycle of abuse. And all those other side effects come into play as well.
I’m fearful of my single self. I like to heal people with physical affection. I’m very willing to let people pour themselves into me, especially when I’m single because their pain is essentially inconsequential to me. It seems like an ideal situation for my partners. Bring me your tension, your trauma, and I will caress and nurse it away. But can it be true that giving in this way and not expecting much of anything in return from my partners can be healthy/fulfilling for me? I say that I’m fearful of this because logically, it’s probably a direct extension of witnessing my mother sacrifice a great deal of herself to an abusive partner to keep him complacent. I already know I’ve internalized this vision of love and have expressed it in very dangerous ways that are toxic to me. By the end of my last relationship I felt like I had completely disappeared. I let him reject and abandon me repeatedly. I allowed my image of myself to become warped and diluted. I no longer knew who I was. I became convinced that if he couldn’t love me how he used to, it was me that needed to change. So I just gave and gave and gave and then there was nothing left for me.
I do not want to continue to be this person. But I also do not want to lose the deeply empathic part of me to bitterness or fear. I guess I worry that this part that feels so deeply for others is just easily triggered because I haven’t healed from my own trauma. But if I can empathize without internalizing, and still can provide my partners with a sense of healing, that feels to me like a gift honestly.
I love love. I love sex. I love people. I don’t want to ever NOT feel that way. However I’m very much not ready to be IN love again. Are there casual relationships that don’t end poorly or painfully? Can you love and fuck someone without falling in love? Seems improbable.
Either way, the bottom line is I’m gonna fuck this guy I adore who’s wife cheated on him. I’ll make him feel sexy and desired because he deserves it. And it makes me feel good to know I can do that for people.
