One moment, things are going fine, and the next, they are completely changed.
“Hey, we should talk. I’m not really sure this is working out for me. I care for you a lot, but I’m just not feeling ‘in love’ with you. I still want to be friends and spend time around you, but I don’t think we should see each other romantically anymore.”
In a single moment, the hull protecting your perfectly pressurized habitat is breached. Air is now rushing out, and being replaced with vacuum. The moment feels like a small eternity, and you are suddenly aware of a bunch of things at once. The union of opposites starts by smacking you dead in the face.
“Wait, we’re breaking up? But I thought things were fine? I asked you last week and you said things were fine. You’ve told me that you loved me every time we’ve talked this week!”
You are suddenly aware of the air. It’s all you have had for some time, and it has been sustaining you. You have been breathing it for so long that you’ve hardly given it a second thought. Every inhale and exhale, it has been there, and now you are faced with the prospect that it may not. You become keenly aware that this is a living example of the expression “taken for granted” and the irony that you understand it now, as it kicks you in the chest.
“What did I do wrong? Was I too controlling? Not interested enough? Was the sex bad? Did I forget something that was important to her? Did I talk too much and not listen enough? What did I do?”
The terminator, the dividing line between the air and vacuum, which you have never seen or thought of before, is now starkly visible. Through that line, you are also aware of the opposite… the vacuum. The absence of everything you have known quickly puts what you have had into sharp perspective. Without choice, and quite immediately, you’re going to have to define yourself in this new paradigm and bid farewell to what you’ve known, and since it is the exact opposite of all you have known and come to define yourself by, the prospect is seriously frightening.
“What am I going to do now? We were supposed to go out of town next week. We have so many plans for the next few months… are all of those not happening now? I don’t want to do things alone.”
There’s a panic that sets in… it is swift and immediate. It forms a mental loop. You can think of nothing but how you are going to survive. The alarm bells, flashing lights, and everything else around you loses intensity as you are focused only on what’s happening and how you will overcome it, and the more you stay trapped in this loop, the less ground you feel like you’re making. It’s sucking you in slowly and the more you try to resist, the more you try to puzzle it out, the more it drags you in.
“Can I win her back? Why won’t she give me a reason?”
Now, this isn’t a perfect metaphor. Humans are adaptable creatures. Given time, we can learn to breathe the metaphorical vacuum, and eventually, repair the damage and fill with space with new air. The sudden decompression has blown us off course, and honestly, we’ll never reacquire the course that we were on, but we’ll get somewhere. Either by our own force of will, or by the help and support of our community, we all get through these moments.
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