Trying to Feel Close to You
I realized something that I haven’t ever known. I realized that I can’t feel close to anyone. More than that I realized something else. That every decision I’ve ever made has been in service of only fulfilling one objective. I want to feel closeness to another human being.
There’s no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to feel closeness to others. I have friends whom I love, and love me back. I have family thats relatively stable. Yet despite all that I don’t feel “close”. I spend and seek to spend time with these people I care for and yet it’s because something is missing there. I wish I could but I can’t.
There’s something disturbing about the whole thing. Sitting across from someone who on paper, is perfect. They say all the right things. They do all the right things. But you don’t really feel anything for them. There’s this gulf between who you want to be and who you are. Wanting to feel close to someone else is human. I understand this. But I don’t understand why that is. I want to explore it.
Object Permanency but with Relationships:
I came to realize I truly was missing something. At first, in my younger and more dramatic days I thought I was geniunly missing a soul or a heart. Some intangible almost metaphysical thing that makes someone “good.” It wasn’t until much later that I was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. It’s here I learnt that I actually was missing something. Some part of the developmental puzzle we are all meant to go through was just a piece I had lost.
When we are born, we do not possess object permanency. Object Permanency is the idea that something is still present even though it isn’t in our line of sight. It’s why babies love to play peek a boo. Now the thing is eventually, the child grows up and between the ages of 2 and 3 it learns that though something is out of sight, it is not necessarily gone.
It’s a powerful idea right? The idea that there is more to the world than what is within our eyesight is the same idea that guarantees we have the ability to work together and achieve so much as a species. I think about the relevance of this now more than ever while in isolation. It seems everyone pines for the things they do not have in front of them, because they know that they are there, that there is a world outside of our homes.
Now object permanence also works with relationships. It’s a cornerstone for how we build lasting connections with one another. The luckiest of us know that just because the person that cares about us isn’t in front of us doesn’t mean they don’t love us just as deeply as they have before. I consider myself fortunate in many things. Not in this.
Opportunity and Dissapointment:
And here’s where things get most interesting. Some of us just can’t fathom the idea that we are loved if it isn’t consistently and readily apparent. Though I have spent much of my life living in a haze of emptiness, I’ve had moments when I felt intense burning love for so many people in my life. The price of that though is that if it isn’t reciprocated, I felt inadequate.
It’s made me adopt a mindset where I try so hard to please the people in my life. It’s made me more of a deceiver than an actual person, and at this junction, it’s hard to remember who I was before.
More than that, It’s made it difficult to know what I want with anyone. Every person is an opportunity to feel that closeness that I so desperately want. And every person eventually dissapoints me when they don’t make me feel it. I’m not proud of living like that.
Do that long enough and eventually you begin to realize how hollow so much interaction is. More than anything I’m in love with the idea of making a strong first impression on a person. To figure out and tell them exactly what they want or need to hear. There’s nothing more exhilarating to me than that. I’m not proud of living like that.
In the end of course I can’t feel close to anyone. I lack the long term skills to give anyone a chance, mostly because I struggle to imagine anyone wanting me to be a part of their life for longer than a few brief moments of passing joy. And that’s all I’ve ever held with others. These moments of closeness which are so beautiful and fulfilling that I feel so content. But they are short moments spread out across years, with other moments like these that last years. Moments where I know that I am well and truly alone terrify me the most. Even these moments have no lack of other people, it’s just that they don’t feel close.
It’s hard. But what gives me some hope is that with enough effort and focus I can remind myself that a lack of feeling that “closeness” doesn’t neceassrily mean it’s absent. I have to make a conscious effort to be less hard on myself and everyone else, because I do know they true. I have to “radically accept” that there are things and connections I want, that I may never have again. The goal is living a full life even in defiance of that. And I hope that’s something we can all do with our desires.
