A Nervous System
A Nervous System
When love feels dangerous, what do you do?
I am a human call center in the process of rebuilding. Every day, new wires are being connected, disconnected, or re-connected anew, between the mind that rules me and the body that houses it. Every single day, I am learning that razing the ground is harder than you might have thought. Demolition day is only one part of it. The walls I’ve put up in the name of self preservation and protection are coming down far more slowly than I would have originally imagined.
And with the passage of time and the tearing down of what once was, systems new and old are emerging and taking root. In this newly mixed metaphor, I'm not just a series of unthinking wires, I am a living, breathing tree. A mycelium network connected to others. I’m getting dialed up and dialed into parts of myself that I’d thought long lost or dead and buried, or maybe never was. I am in an awakening, awash with the myriad thoughts and feelings that spring up as they do, too. I am leaving messages and returning calls to my corporeal form. That I am aware of any of this at all feels an absolute fuckin’ miracle. And also an inevitability I've been working towards forever.
In this time of great expansion, I’m feeling very nervous. I have never felt older…and also like a child. Each day is a humbling experience in keeping myself tuned in and turned on to the reality existing within me and in front of me in my interpersonal relationships. And right now the foundations of what it means to be loved are being torn up and rebuilt underneath my feet as I try and take each scary, new step forward.
In some ways, this is a long-winded way of explaining that I'm currently dating someone lovely, and the core wounds of me are being activated and excavated—and, in many ways, healed—in real time. And it’s short-circuiting my systems: none of my current situation computes for my body and its experience with that thing called love.
Love is not unconditional. At least, not in my experience. Love, to me, has always felt like a threat. Love, in the way I’ve learned it, has to be earned through dutiful service and blind allegiance. Through enduring fists and fits. Through putting another person and their wants and needs and reality above all else. Your own desires and experiences are of little importance when it comes to the act of love or being loved. Love, for me, has never felt good. I am terrified by love and all its hurtful unknowns. I don’t feel strong enough to carry the weight of love without breaking or drowning in the overwhelm I feel.
To feel cared for is paralyzing.
It starts as an unease, when someone shows their care for me. The fear sets in when they begin to notice things or want to hang around. What do you mean you’re paying attention? To my wants and needs and idiosyncracies? What is wrong with you? What do you want? I must be doing too much if you're noticing how I physically and emotionally respond to things. Are you cataloging things about me that need to be fixed or managed? That I need to change, lest you run? Are you going to use my love and care for you against me? Or will you just simply abandon me without a word or warning when it all becomes too much? When some unknowable threshold is met, never to be heard from again.
To the most lizard parts of my brain, the most animal parts of my body, intimacy is a threat. A vulnerability worth avoiding if you want to stay alive. It’s how being known has always felt to me, since I was a kid.
The love I’ve experienced throughout my life has largely been defined by violence, pity, and abuse. Love, for me, only ever felt like a cudgel. A weapon they’d wield—the price of loving and wanting to be loved. And any time I tried to prove my love to, say, a parent who was drunk and threatening to kill themselves, it was met with derision or outright vitriolic anger. It was thrown back in my face and denied, denied, denied, as not real or enough: I didn’t love them, I didn’t care. If I did, they wouldn’t feel this low and un-cared-for. They wouldn’t need to drink or kill themselves working.
"I only hit you because I love you.” I can still recall the tense look of pity on the face of one of my classmates as she tried to ignore what she just saw and walk past me.
Love has felt like an absence and an abscess. Infected and painful, a hole to be filled—my understanding of the love I should receive or deserved has been defined by its lack or its wounding.
I have cried on more than one occasion while uttering the phrase "I just feel like I have so much love to give," feeling hopeless at ever proving to anyone that I loved and cared enough. Feeling like I keep picking the wrong people to love and feeling rejected by their ambivalence. Feeling like I must just be bad at loving and being loved. The problem was always me, me, me.
The toxicity at the heart of my core relationships has shaped me into a thing that fights what she loves (namely, to love). I do not feel like I deserve to be loved. That if someone loves or cares about me, there must be something wrong with them. That I am a broken thing unworthy of love. And that, actually, I am not loving or giving enough. I worry that I am self-centered and self-serving in how I love. That what I think are loving actions are actually anything but—that I'm simply delusional and not worthy of love.
For a long time I wore an enamel pin on my denim jacket with the phrase "hard to love" emblazoned upon it. An old executive pointed at it during an emotional conversation we were having and said "that's the real problem here. That you think that at all." I immediately started sobbing in a highly unprofessional manner.
Earlier this year, I found the pin again while cleaning. What once felt like armor looked like what it really was: an open wound begging to be seen and healed through secure and mature connection. For decades, instead of healing it, though, I buried it and ran away, hoping that time would do the heavy lifting for me.
It didn't.
Do you know how silly and childish it feels, to feel like you're doing something for the first time that everyone else seems to take for granted? I am learning how to love and feel love in a way that feels safe and secure. People don't realize how vital having and experiencing stable, loving, secure relationships in childhood is, how integral it is to be affirmed in love in order to love and be loved later in life, and what a disadvantage it puts people at to not have that experience during those most impactful years. The very foundational relationships in my life were ones of instability, chaos, violence, judgment, gaslighting, and abuse. The people who I was repeatedly told loved me, that I should rely on for support and acceptance, were the ones throwing the first blows, both literal and metaphorical. I feel like I'm working from so far behind it's too late for me to catch up enough to successfully be in a relationship with someone. It's humiliating, embarrassing, and humbling. For most people, it's been simply too much to manage, because I hadn't even begun to manage it myself.
I'm nervous. It's hard to burn your systems down in an attempt to reboot and renew it—more so because you cannot do this work alone. Love and care happen in communion with others. You cannot love and care in a silo or vacuum, alone. You have to be vulnerable and open, even with your fear of intimacy or general inexperience around safe and affirming love. Wires may get crossed on the journey of rebuilding, but without the act of doing, love doesn't stand a chance. To build and rebuild takes time and exposure and chance. Burning it all down to the ground is only the beginning, not the end.