The difficulty in explaining myself

Years ago, I fell in love with a girl. It happened very quickly and I wasn’t able to name it until after but I’m certain now that what I felt was love. It might not have necessarily been a romantic love but it is the kind of love that sustained itself and could have gone on for a lifetime. Sadly, it ended quickly and abruptly.

I’ve only ever had one other relationship before this that I saw sustaining itself for a lifetime too but it ended too, a slow and drawn out death with no closure either.

We have a tendency, I think, to prioritise romantic or sexual love over platonic ones. As though the interest to be physically intimate is in any way an indicator of a relationship’s importance. In such times, we fail to recognise that we devalue such friendships or relationships.

I fell in love with a girl and felt so strongly so quickly that it surprised me because I rarely become close to someone that easily. I wanted her to stay with me for a lifetime, for hers or for mine in whatever capacity we could have.

However, she left as quickly as she came and I still don’t have closure to the end of that relationship. I was never given an explanation for why things ended the way they did but I have made my peace with it.

Initially, I first tried to explain this to close friends but they dismissed it so casually, that the short time we spent together wasn’t enough for you to become close to someone. What I felt wasn’t love, I was told. I just wanted it to be.

The entire experience was a disappointment and it coloured how I felt about her in such a negative light that I was resentful of her for doing this to me, I was angry with my friends for being so casually dismissive, I was angry with myself for being so stupid; for not being able to tell the difference between how I felt and what I wanted to feel.

Until now, I still haven’t been able to let go of it completely and it means there is still a distrust of telling my friends about how I feel about other people.

I can’t place the blame entirely on them though. I should have moved passed this and mostly, I have. It’s not as though I cry myself to sleep every night but it has meant that I am less trusting and open with personal feelings and information.

I also understand that if I don’t attempt to explain this feeling, that I do them a disservice but I worry very much about being taken the wrong way. I fear that they may pay lip service but secretly think that I’m just as stupid or desperate to be validated or affirmed.

I repress too many of my feelings so that I stay meek and maintain my friendships for the sake of other people. I know it isn’t healthy; that it will one day bite back but I find myself so truly disappointed in people sometimes that I would rather keep this part of myself to myself.

Careless words make people love you less and while I know I have a talent for knowing what words or phrases sound good together, I’ve never been particularly adept at making my feelings clear to people I care about. I’d rather be quiet than shout at someone for hurting my feelings and I’ve done it before, I would rather just not reply to a text message than risk a friendship.

For much of my life, I’ve never really had very much closure when my relationships ended. I know that rarely do things happen as they do in the movies, friendship break ups don’t end with formal arrangements or shouting matches.

Somehow because of the nature of the relationship, friendships tend to be dismissed for not being as important as any other relationship in life. And while I know I do a disservice to my friends for not trusting them with this part of my life, I know they do me a disservice for thinking that my problems are not as important or valid as theirs.

And this is why I have chosen to keep a distance from them.

I cannot control how things end if the other party decides to end it first so I’ve made it a habit to always keep a distance until it is proven otherwise that what I have to say will be taken well.

I feel the same way with regards to my mental health as well. It’s particularly bad timing, though to be fair I don’t know when’s going to be a good time for troubled mental issues to come knocking anyway.

I have friends who struggle and experience or have experienced depression. What I felt for a long time was something similar to depression but not entirely. I felt ashamed to call what I have depression because it’s not that. Or if it is, then I’m still not brave or confident enough to call it that yet.

It’s a whole different animal with familiar stripes.

It’s resurfaced lately and I’ve taken the time and pain to try retrace its roots and basically, it’s pretty much started since I was young and only just recently started to manifest again.

I worry that I will experience it again soon because I bring it up again here and the easiest fix is to not think about it. Bit counter-productive considering I wanted this blog to be a place for my feelings but here it is — I have been having disassociation episodes. I’ll try to explain and elaborate on it further in another entry but I’ve been experiencing derealisation and depersonalisation. I understand some people conflate the two together and it completely makes sense to me but during certain episodes, it’s either one or the other to me. And in other times, it’s been both.

On my other blog, I’ve been cagey and secretive about it. I know how that comes across, as though my problems are so serious that I cannot talk about it. In truth, it is. It’s of enough gravity that I’ve only come out about it to one person and no one else.

The fear of coming out to other people about this issue is two-pronged. Firstly , it stems from the fear of being dismissed and invalidated. Secondly, from the fear that it’s true that I am only desperate for attention, that it all only ever happened in my head.