The last two years have been the loneliest of my life to date. Sometimes I wonder whether a host who has been newly ridden of a longtime parasite feels the same kind of lonely.
Last week I sent a text ending a relationship that once meant so much to me — once — but for the six months leading up to it, I sent others:
Before the radio silence, we had talked on the phone about the disappearing act that they regularly performed. I’m pretty sure I said that I would always be there: that I would always love them and I would be around when they came back.
This was true until I needed people. I suppose a boundary gets learned and established one way or another. After muting them on Instagram to subvert the chest pain that arose every time I saw a photo of them hanging out with people we both loved, the pain became more bearable. I continued EMDR therapy and kept working on the impossible (read: trusting that people can love me well after the immense brain-changing betrayal trauma from 2023).
Then, agoraphobia. Around July, shortly after I turned 28 in the presence of my darling cat and my portrait of Harriet Tubman, I began experiencing a crippling fear of my front door. This fear of door, the people and places beyond it, and the deception that awaited me along my ever present search for truth, was devastating for many base home functionality reasons (like taking out trash), but also because I’m an extrovert.
I’m a middle child of five and I used to believe the worst thing I could be was alone. I understand it far better now: alone (by myself, with myself) is fine, alone (because I have been abandoned) is bearable and somewhat commonplace, alone (because I am crippled by an irrational phobia born from a reasonable fear of people who lie to my face when I ask for truth with truth) is agonizing. I can do alone. I shouldn’t have to if the people who care, care.
In January, I cried in my car to my friend back home in Cape Town about how the aforementioned person hadn’t responded to any of my texts. I cried (with a lot of snot) about the disbelief that they would ghost me like the others did, especially because they stood with me when the others did. I cried because I had never been so lonely: why did this person who called themself my sibling not care?
Maybe they were upset with me. Maybe I had done irreprable harm to them without knowing. Maybe they decided I was just a POS at the end of the day. All of these are fine reasons to end a friendship (kinship?), and all of them must be communicated if that is the case.
No communication. From them, silence and turning off location sharing. From me, throwing up in the shower after feeling the same searing pain from 2023. Why wouldn’t they just talk to me if something was wrong? Why do they care to prop up all their friends in proximity, and why do they not care about me enough to talk? What happened? Why would they do that? What did I do? What could have been different? Why did they abandon me?
It all comes back to abandonment: Why did they abandon me after assuring me they would not? And more importantly: Why do I continue to abandon myself by trying to rationalize behavior that I believe to be unacceptable?
Last Tuesday, as I bilaterally tapped my way through the fog of agoraphobia and complex trauma, I shut my laptop after therapy feeling awful. I realized that the versions of me that fought to stay alive for love and all the love I am and believe in… didn’t believe me. I didn’t stay alive with my heart open to be ignored for a year only to say, “Hey, door’s open! Trample away!“. I didn’t survive to be mistreated by someone who said they cared. How could that make sense? How could you care for me by stomping all over the tender ground that you knew I had prepared for seeding my healing?
Could care look like that? Actually?
Maybe for you or someone else, dear reader, but not for me. On Wednesday, I typed up this message and waited 30 minutes before hitting send:
I thought I would feel worse than I did. I read the message over and over again. I thought: Is this it? Is this the end of what non-blood siblinghood could be for me? Is this the nail in the New Jersey coffin? Is this what I need to do to stick by myself?
The short answer was yes. I refused to abandon myself and the versions that stayed alive for love. I refused to abandon my understanding of the love I am by rationalizing poor treatment. I sent the text and I blocked them.
Stoked to be making room for new relationships that don’t pummel my self esteem indeed.
Yesterday I nearly went to the ER for chest pain. Today I’m being very brave and going slack lining for the second time ever. This past week my ballet shoes arrived. Tomorrow, I will clock into a corporate job that I don’t believe I need to do or have anymore.
The clock has started to unwind in a very, very Uranus in Gemini fashion, and I am not afraid of time.
Year in, year out, some things stay the same: October like a river; Shalom like a boat.
love you mean it,
Shalom xo
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