Abandonment Issues

I’m sitting and listening to Eminem flow in the background as I type. Several people are going to raise their eyebrows because it’s “Superman.” I am in a twisted mood because my stomach is nauseous thinking about how Diane screwed me to the wall emotionally by saying that I had abandonment issues. I was not reacting to the trauma she dished. The fault was in me because I just couldn’t get over it. I was in contact with her longer than my biological parents were married, and they divorced in 1997, when I was a freshman in college. I was reeling from my abuse at the time, because my high school girlfriend had left for college and I was mired in rumination about both relationships. Because of the job they did on me, I didn’t date anyone for three years afterward. However, when my first wife came into my life, I’d picked the same personality type. She walked all over me because I knew I deserved it. I set people up to use me, and I do it willingly. I refuse to believe that people love me at times, because I know they’re just humoring me. And then I treat them that way, and humoring me becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because I’m so difficult to be around, anyway. I have to constantly apologize for my behavior, because I do not often have the ability to be light-hearted. I want to know the answers to questions that seem like emotional bombs because I am taking the emotional temperature of the relationship when it doesn’t need it because I don’t have the safety and security of knowing that your words are sincere. It is not of you, I don’t have the ability to trust anyone. At my core, I have one friend, and that is Diane Syrcle. Just one. I found that tape today, as I was looking for a problem with someone else. I thought Diane wanted me to be the love of her life, because at 14, you have a different idea of “being family” than a 25 year old. What I have decided is that I am. If Diane could love anyone the way she wanted to, it would be me. If I’d known better, I’d have imprinted on someone else. I didn’t, but the imprint is there and erasing it is emotional neurosurgery. I feel like I have my brain exposed and I’m just doing conduction tests at home… which is just as smart as doing your own leg amputation.

Dana needs to be at my core. So do Aaron and Argo. They’re fighting to get in, and I just keep pushing them away because I don’t want them to leave me first. I’m trying so hard to change, because it just perpetuates the same emotional abuse I’ve lived most of my life and inflicts it on people around me. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I have got to cut the tape that says I need this, because in some cases my ability to pop off has saved relationships because no one was saying what really needed to be said and after I opened my big mouth, we didn’t have any choice.

I’m bad a small talk. Really bad. The reason I’m bad at it is that I can’t stay on that level. I find most people vapid. If you can’t hold my intellectual interest, I’m done. However, I find a lot of different things funny, so it isn’t necessarily about book smart. I don’t like people that don’t think, really think about the world around them. My personality type says that I have the ability to see things as they should be and not as they are. Therefore, I want to talk about things that could be and not things that are. I want you to create something out of nothing, like a new neural pathway that wasn’t there before, because I want you to remember me as being someone that gives you something precious… a new way of reacting to the world, no matter what it might be.

This is because I have to impress my worth upon you, because I know how you see me before you even have a chance to tell me what you think and I will lash out at you when you try because how dare you love me? How dare you even say so?

When I realized that was my thought process, I realized I’d gotten to the smallest of the small letter l leslie. My inner teenager sobbed with grief. Because she left me, I’ve left everyone. The people that love me now are the ones that stand up against that tidal wave of crazy and let me cry out my frustrations. They chip away at the idea that my value rises and falls at regular intervals if I don’t try like hell to get you to notice I’m still here.

I have ensured that you won’t, because I won’t let you.

This is the tape I have to cut through, and right now the knife is midway. It is blitzkrieg up in this bitch as I try to remove Diane to make room for the three new people that have genuinely become my family. Perhaps someday, maybe more. I’m just not that far along yet, and my capital with others’ patience of it is stretched like saltwater taffy. I am doing everything I can to change myself, because there is only so much that a therapist can do. People don’t change after years of therapy because the therapist is amazing. If the therapist is the amazing one, then people go to therapy to spend time with the doctor rehashing their other 13 introductory-level meetings. The patients that win take on their own issues and report to the doctor how they’ve improved. You’re supposed to talk about different things every week. Otherwise, what are you paying for? You’re letting a highly paid professional babysit for an hour while you tell the same story of how you were hurt last week without even advancing mentally to this one. In my case, it has taken the bravery to unwrap emotions to my core. When I don’t, I treat my family like shit and I become the emotional disaster I’ve always thought I was. I apologize, and we move on, because they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can be absolute toolbags in front of me and I’ll still love them, anyway.

It’s the Tao of Friendship.