When you think of the word “successful,” who’s the first person that comes to mind and why?
The first person? The very first person?
Me.
I don’t have the same definition of success as most people, because I’m not most people. My personality dictates that I am frighteningly intense with emotions because I take the time to know how I feel with certainty. I don’t hem and haw over people’s feelings anymore, because I realized it was masking behavior. I have worked with people on the spectrum since I was in college. It’s par for the course in IT. But what I never put together is that the way I process emotions is a symptom of ADHD, Autism, and PTSD. Figuring out where behavior is coming from is nigh impossible…. but what it does mean is that I have words to explain it now that I didn’t before, because I met two successful people.
They’re best friends who are in a partnership, but without the hassle of romance. They have, in essense, what Bryn and I have. The absolute faith that we could step off a plane tomorrow, move in together, and live happily ever after as partners who enjoy each other. Romance doesn’t enter the picture because it can’t. I don’t want to chase her across the country and she doesn’t want to chase me, either. It would mean moving to a place where I wasn’t comfortable and having to sit in it until it didn’t hurt anymore. If she came here, she’d have to let go of an amazing community and we’d be relying on each other for a lot until she established herself. Obviously I have thought about this a lot. It’s not because I’m on a quest to steal her away from her boyfriend and complete life in Oregon. I’ve thought about it a lot because she’s the one I’d want whether we were officially together or not.
What I have found is that even when you don’t have a significant other, you still need a partner to bounce ideas off of so you don’t always make every decision on your own echo chamber instead of what people actually say. I’m careful with my words and the meaning of them because we both have an anxious attachment style. Again, an anxious attachment is not a bad thing. You just have to do a ton of work on yourself to shut down The Committee™ that tells you they’re just being nice.
I know because I’ve been treating Supergrover like that for 10 years, but it isn’t an undeserved or uninformed judgment call. If someone has an avoidant attachment style, it doesn’t mean “I ignore people.” It means “I ignore me and focus on you to avoid having to do the work.” Both Supergrover and I do this to an enormous degree, we just come at it from opposite ends of the spectrum. One bleeds out for the other; the other feeds the bleeding out because especially in neurodivergent relationships (one or both halves), we think there must be a way to explain how we feel that makes sense and we will turn it over in our brains until it does. But if your neurodivergence is depression (unipolar or bipolar), your brain knows the very best lies to use against you. Mine, for 46 years, has been that everyone is just being nice to me………. also not an uninformed opinion due to the fact that my personality is only found in 9% of the population. I’ve been able to express needs on this level since I learned to speak.
I just didn’t.
I was praised for never needing anything, so I’d do all sorts of shit to prove I was the perfect child. When I was 14, I felt like my emotional abuser was abandoning me, and she was really the only mother I had at this point. My mother was not malicious, she just didn’t make me comfortable enough to open up. And said emotional abuser said she was an open book and acted like it wasn’t true. So, whether she said it was on the up and up or it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. As a child, her perceptions were my reality. She was also an avoidant personality and within a decade of first contact I’d become a complete shell of a person. That’s because I moved to Portland to be with her, a non-romantic partner in life because what I know now is that I need what Lucy Maude Montgomery calls “a bosom friend.” Before, I put everything in one basket emotionally and my relationships tended to break because of it. Most of the time, it’s that I put too much pressure on the relationship in the beginning because I opened up too much too soon. Having such a close friend takes all that pressure off dating, as does my blog (a blessing and a curse). Writing serves as my partner and lover a hundred percent of the time.
That’s because I had to fall in love with me before I could fall in love with anyone else. It’s not a trite saying. It’s owning a lot and it can get so bad that you end up curled on the floor of the bathroom crying. Sometimes it manifests in behavior- the kind that creates reactions that you know are wrong and will have devastating effects on both parties, but your brain is trying to save you. Picking apart unhealthy reflexes takes me hours every day because I let it.
Making the commitment to get to know myself has cost me in other areas of my life, but it doesn’t mean I’m self-obsessed for a negative purpose. I am not castigating everyone else, I am explaining how others’ reactions to me affect me. I never approach any situation thinking that the other party is wrong and I’m right. If I love you enough to struggle, I will give you as long as it takes to get it together…. and not because I need to be with perfect people. It’s that we won’t get along if you think the way I process is weird. If you take an active interest in reading here because you think it gives you an angle that it doesn’t. Feel free to throw anything you want back in my face as long as it will lead to productivity in our relationship. Get as angry as you want, but don’t walk away if you value me. Take the time to understand why your reaction was angry so that we can discuss it when cooler heads prevail. You are free to walk away in your own anger, but I’ll talk about all our problems here until I can smile and laugh with you again.
Relationships are all about success when both parties want to understand how to reach common ground because they can express how they feel about something. Ironically enough, the people I think do the best at this are Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith. From what I gather, they are both trying to get emotionally intelligent about themselves before they discuss being real partners again. I had to change my mind when I realized how ragingly hypocritical I was of them, because they were doing exacty what I tell people to do on this web site. Know yourself first. How bad do you think I wish Supergrover had a blog where I could read what she’s been thinking this whole time as well? I’d cut off my arm for it no regrets.
Before, I thought of this couple as unsuccessful.
Though it is not true by any societal standard. We of the United States tend to measure success in wealth. My personality doesn’t do that. Success is owning your behavior and realizing how great you are, because you’ve finally let yourself off the hook for having raged at someone when it’s a symptom of something bigger. That you couldn’t have done any better because that’s all the life experience you had at the time. One of the things I think limited my relationship with Supergrover is that I got time blindness and realized we had gone a very long way down a very bad road without resolving anything, so we were outwardly nice and not kind. We’d fight because we’d let rage and resentment build. I was trying to fix that problem, and Supergrover doesn’t have the time or want with me because I think she’s terrified of how she really feels, because a lot would come up and it would end her emotionally. I am not putting her down in the slightest. We are just not in the same place mentally to be able to accept our flaws and move on, because only I am laying my thoughts on the table.
Before, I thought we were successful and had a shot at redeeming the other in our own eyes if we resolved all the cognitive dissonance. As we spent longer and longer without meeting, our behavior toward each other became entrenched and it was an impossibly large connection to break, because I said I reach for her in the night when I get scared. What I did not say is who was rescuing whom in that situation and what the circumstances might be. That’s the part where only she has answers. My basic, fundamental need in this relationship was ignored in this relationship because I thought if she forgave me on the surface in the moment, over time I’d be able to heal her with my explanations as to why I did what I did and be able to dig deeper into the building blocks of our relationship.
By the time I realized that it was an anxious attachment that was costing me dearly, the cornerstone had been set and the foundation had been laid. If I had recognized that, I never would have told her that I had feelings for her in the first place. That’s because it introduced a fracture in the relationship and we don’t get the right to those anymore. I cannot distance myself from her any more than she can distance herself from me, and that’s what creates the feeling that she’s my primary partner now. The push/pull has become too great a swing, though, because I feel like I’m doing my best to show up every day without fail, because we would not be successful together (with her as my “heterosexual lifemate”) if I was inconsistent. You cannot prove to someone with an avoidant attachment style that you’re really in it for the long haul. It is almost impossible, because they feel so guilty about and jealous of your ability to emote when they can’t.
In explaining what I know about attachments to everyone, hopefully I can explain it to her, too. What I realized is that she was a hurt little girl and so was I. When we were fighting, it was the feeling of getting so angry that you’re fighting with someone who isn’t even in the room. Taking out your anger on someone else who is also not even in the room when you’ve only had a virtual relationship. I am explaining what I know about attachments to kick my own ass as well. With your parents, you cannot and should not attribute rage to triggers you didn’t create. You had no culpability back then and there’s no statute of limitations. You are always allowed, even in your 70s if by some miracle your parents are still alive, to blame your parents for things like a child because that’s not the relationship you set up and that’s how it was supposed to be.
Dog parents know this better than human parents, I think, because few people are unwilling to apply pack mentality to their children. When you do that, you leave the entire family anxious because no one knows the rules. Children are not culpable for the actions of the alpha. Ever. It is impossible by design. If you’re mad at your adult children, it is 100% your responsibility to fix it, because they shouldn’t ever take responsibility for their emotional reactions in front of you. The burden of proof is on you, and you will fuck up your children if you invert that dynamic. They’ll get PTSD reactions and you’ll say “not my fault. You’re an adult now.” In every other relationship in your life, that is a stone cold fact. It’s not taking responsibility for the life you nurtured when you are called on your behavior. Here’s the truth with your kids that’s ironclad. If your actions and your words don’t line up and we spend our whole lives guessing, then when we’re adults we will be forced to go low contact or no contact because we cannot find ourselves without it. Boundaries not being clear as children makes adults who can’t negotiate them because they never learned.
An adult is the equivalent of an Irish Wolfhound puppy. Still young. Still looks like a grown ass adult when in reality, they’re less than a year old. I don’t know anyone who is successful at navigating attachment styles and love languages who does’t intrinsically view people that way. Do you think that anyone is actually capable of being president without that job completely dicing them emotionally and reducing them to their most childlike selves when they’re alone? My attachment style comes from wanting to get to know people in the way they talk to themselves when no one is there. It’s an anxious attachment style because if I show that I am genuinely interested in their problems, they’ll keep talking and I get to avoid my own shit. The anxiety part is thinking that people are just being nice. That they’re a good friend and you’re a bad one. That in order to keep avoiding myself, I must do things to please them to get them to continue opening up to me. This was a well-entrenched pattern installed in my mother. She died before my hopes that she’d self actualize came true in as big a way as it needed to be for her to really enjoy her life. She was just starting that process of individuation from my stepfather, trying to understand why she didn’t enjoy life as much before, getting emotionally stronger every day.
And that’s the worst feeling in the entire world. To know that she was on the cusp of something great for her and she didn’t live to see it. But I lived to see how much she left behind in terms of how she touched people’s lives, the good outcomes in trying to please everyone. I think she did enjoy her life, just like I do. I just think that her life was ruled by self doubt. Both Lindsay and I absolutely rebelled against that. Just like Supergrover, she is one of the purest people I have ever met in my life who will also eat your face off if you cross her, particularly if the object of your ire is me. She has always been physically stronger than me to quite a large degree because I’m disabled. She’s the younger sister, therefore she doesn’t view me as leaning on her and thinking of her as older and wiser as I do. That there are just some things I will never be able to do, and one of them is having her presence when I walk into a room. I get respect when I talk to people for a little while, because people who don’t interact with me in any meaningful way don’t see me as an emotionally mature adult. They see me as a cute toy because I’m small. An easy target to bully especially when you double down because the way you think is normal and the way I think is not……… when in reality a lot more people need their brain chemicals balanced than will ever actually go to the doctor for it.
My mother never did. I would have given anytihng, anything to see her after six weeks of Lexapro. But as her daughter, I couldn’t push her. The closest I’ve ever gotten is straight up telling her I thought she should talk to someone. That’s because even though I’m the child, you cannot see the forest for the trees when you’re in it. Depression, especially when untreated, will make you a shell of a person who does nothing but think about how bad they are. “Let’s do something really scary.” “We could go to bed early and be alone with our thoughts.”
Hell is not other people. It’s being uncertain about where you err and other people don’t, because you are not taking time to look at the pattern in an objective manner. Two egos duke it out because there’s too much pride involved. You’re not coming to a place of vulnerability with each other, you’re just butting heads and the longer it goes on, the pettier your fights will get so that you think the fight is about one thing when it’s generally about something else…… but you don’t know that because you can’t see it.
That’s why being a writer is so important to me. I am not looking at anything but being successful about how I express my needs, and the long journey it has taken me to get there. To me, prayer is a tool for journaling. Trying to make these blog entries when they’re really letters to God, because God is the punching bag who can take it and Supergrover isn’t…… and never should have been put in that position given the enormity of my emotions where she is concerned. The roots of our permutation as friends are unresolved, so she thinks I’m throwing darts when I write from a third person perspective. That I am telling her what I notice, not trying to make her feel one way or the other about it. The letters are persuasive by their nature, not by objective fact…. because people aren’t thinking of what you’re expressing. They’re focusing on their reactions. How it affects them is more important to them than their behavior affects you, and that’s just looking out for number one. It has nothing to do with intentional hurt most of the time. It is the nature of being human. Being responsible and letting go of guilt. Being mindful and carrying no shame.
The more you can state your own boundaries, the more people are capable of relaxing in your presence. That’s why some people are naturally drawn to others. Those who do the work attract people who don’t because in the short term, it feels like you’re fulfilling each other’s every need, and it breaks down because of division of labor. You cannot divide and conquer a relationship. You can only sit down with mediation.
Your ultimate success depends on how willing you are to acknowledge when you’re the problem and can work with people to handle your own flaws while you handle theirs. You can’t change people. This is how you get quirks to line up. They’re only negative when you can’t be sensitive to others’ needs, just as important as yours and yet you still discard them because people tend to believe they’re right a hundred percent of the time. That doesn’t come from arrogance. That comes from how you were raised, the reason you are not responsible for your reactions to your parents and you are to your friends. The hierarchy is set and you cannot break it until the child is ready to be the alpha of their own lives. In some families, this leads to outright physical violence, but I am not speaking from experience personally. I’m speaking from the perspective of having spoken to thousands of people over my lifetime about their trauma responses, because I feel so welcoming to people that they emotionally vampire me because I can’t not let them, or I couldn’t…………..
Until I became successful, like I thought everyone else was but me.
Stories That Are All True 