A Love I Don't Have To Survive

I remember lying in my bed as a little girl, wondering how my father could sleep at night when I was lying awake, wondering if he was dead or alive. Another portion of my brain held the same confusion toward my mother.

In essence, one parent traumatized me by leaving while the other, though continuing to give me food and shelter, inflicted generations upon generations of curses that left my thoughts sick with self-hate for 27 years. I'm now 29.

I truly never thought I'd get here, not after everything I've been through. I don't hate my mother. In fact, I don't think I would have come to the conclusions I have without the life lessons she taught me, both good and bad. We lack emotional depth with one another, which is something I've longed for in ways I can't even explain. My father, who I'd spent decades pretending I didn't care about, hurt me in a much deeper way.

I'd fought tooth and nail, denying rampant daddy issues that everyone acknowledged but me. He abandoned me so many times that I looked for love in boys I met online; I was groomed by old men on the internet and even in real life; each time filled with hope that someone would love me.

All the while, never knowing that while on one hand I was having the stationary curious conversations with boys my age at the time, I was also being assaulted several times over by the older men that I would meet.

At the time, it didn't register. In my heart, I justified what I knew was wrong because they were "risking" their lives for me, something my own father hadn't even done. So, throughout my teen years and much of my adulthood, I chased any love that would find me.

And when I say any love, I mean any version of it that could convince me I wasn't being abandoned.

I didn't need it to be healthy. I didn't need it to be consistent. Hell, half the time I didn't even need it to feel good. I just needed someone to stay.

Or, more accurately, I needed someone to make me believe they might stay.

That distinction cost me years.

I became incredibly good at making homes out of people who had only offered me a chair. I could take a crumb of affection and stretch it into a five-course meal. A good morning text could erase three days of inconsistency. An apology could wipe the slate clean without changed behavior. A few hours of tenderness could convince me that weeks of confusion were simply the price of admission.

I called it loyalty.

I called it seeing the good in people.

I called it loving hard.

Sometimes, it was.

Other times, I was abandoning myself before somebody else got the chance.

That's a hard sentence to write because for most of my life, abandonment was something that happened to me. My father did it physically. My mother, although present, could do it emotionally. Men would later do some combination of the two. I became so accustomed to asking, “Why wasn't I enough for them to stay?” that it never occurred to me to ask a much more important question:

Why was I so willing to leave myself in order to make them stay?

I know the answer now.

Because little me still had the steering wheel.

She was still lying in that bed wondering where her dad was. Still hoping that being prettier, funnier, quieter, sexier, easier, more understanding, less emotional—or whatever the hell else somebody needed—would finally make her worth choosing.

And God, did I become adaptable.

I could shrink myself to fit almost anywhere.

The problem with constantly shrinking yourself, though, is that eventually you wake up and have no fucking idea how big you were supposed to be.

Then I became somebody's mother.

Motherhood didn't magically heal me. If anything, it dragged every unhealed part of me into fluorescent lighting and said, look at it.

Suddenly, I was responsible for teaching a little girl what love looked like.

Not what it sounded like when somebody was apologizing.

Not what it looked like during the honeymoon period.

Not what somebody promised they were going to become.

What. It. Looked. Like.

And children don't learn that from speeches. They learn it by watching us.

That realization scared the shit out of me.

Because how could I teach my daughter that love should feel safe while allowing mine to feel like survival?

How could I teach her boundaries while mine disappeared the second I was afraid someone might leave?

How could I tell her that she never had to earn affection while I was still auditioning for it?

I couldn't.

At least, not without eventually becoming a hypocrite.

So somewhere along the way, my definition of love began changing.

And unfortunately, healthy love was boring as hell to a nervous system trained on chaos.

There was no dramatic chase. No detective work. No staring at my phone trying to decipher a three-word text like I was cracking the fucking Zodiac cipher. No emotional high from finally receiving affection after being deprived of it.

Peace didn't initially feel like peace.

It felt empty.

That's the fucked-up thing about healing nobody really warns you about: sometimes the thing that's good for you feels wrong simply because wrong is what you're familiar with.

I had spent so much of my life surviving love that I didn't know what to do when I realized I didn't actually need it to survive at all.

I used to think being alone was the worst possible ending.

Now I think losing myself to avoid it would be worse.

There are still pieces of me that want the fairytale. I haven't become some emotionally detached woman who thinks relationships are pointless. I want companionship. I want intimacy. I want somebody I can laugh with until my stomach hurts and annoy for the next fifty years.

I just don't want it badly enough to bleed for it anymore.

And that's new.

I don't want butterflies that are actually anxiety.

I don't want potential.

I don't want to fall in love with who somebody could be if they'd just heal, grow up, communicate, get sober, go to therapy, deal with their childhood, stop lying, become emotionally available, or finally recognize my worth.

Baby, that's a renovation project.

I'm tired.

I want the finished house.

And if that house never comes?

Mine is pretty fucking comfortable.

Because somewhere between that little girl lying awake wondering whether her father was dead or alive and the woman writing this today, I finally became someone she could depend on.

Me.

I'm the person who stays now.

I'm the person who picks her up.

I'm the person who says, this hurts, but we're leaving anyway.

I'm the person who no longer mistakes somebody wanting access to me for somebody valuing me.

And maybe that's what healing has looked like for me—not finally finding the person who loves me enough to undo every person who didn't.

Maybe it was realizing that was never anybody else's job.

I spent years searching for love like it was oxygen. I inhaled whatever version of it somebody handed me and called myself grateful because somewhere deep inside, I was still terrified there wouldn't be another breath.

There will be.

There always fucking is.

And for the first time in my life, I'm not standing at the door begging anyone to stay.

They can stay because they love me well.

They can leave because they don't.

Either way, I survive.

Actually—

I think I'm finally ready to do a little more than that.