When I first learned about her, no less than two million buffalo stampeded across my chest. (That is just an estimate at the risk of sounding dramatic.) When the dust finally settled, when chaos clipped its own wing & the Earth relinquished her thunder, I found the remains of a heart not twenty feet from my aching body, trampled into a bloody mess. This heart did not belong to me, but I ripped open my own ribcage just to double-check.
Many years ago, on Valentine’s Day, her favorite holiday, I suddenly lost my close work friend at a former job to a heart attack. No one saw it coming. We were close but only in the workplace, not outside of work. We worked together everyday for almost ten years. We always said we would hang out one day outside work, and she would invite me to her house to celebrate the holidays with her family, but it just never happened. We never talked outside work unless we just happened to see each other on the streets or in stores. But she was often on my mind, and I could tell I was often on hers. She would tell me she saw things that reminded her of me. And she would come running over and say “Kim! I couldn’t wait to tell you this, you’ll never believe it…” (One day it was that her grandbaby said “f*ck,” and he learned it through her without her intending it 😆) She was old enough to be my mom and has adult sons and grandkids. She would hug me as we were closing up for the night and say “Love ya, girl, be careful!!” She talked to me and scolded me in a motherly kind of way. I used to overhear her bragging about me to people, telling them about classes I took, about how sweet she thought I am, as if I was her daughter. She had no idea I heard.
One day she collapsed at work and died on the floor. I wasn’t there that day, I was on a meditation retreat. I had this morbid need to see the room she died in, to stand on the spot where they told me her body hit. I thought it would feel cold and dangerous, dark, threatening, and for some reason I had to see, to feel it. I thought it would feel like a place where someone’s life ended, that the walls would somehow whisper of a last breath taken, of a warm body, full of energy, full of future plans, suddenly becoming cold & lifeless on the floor. I thought it would become a place of dread, a place I couldn’t bear to set foot, to lay eyes on. I never saw inside the room before that, just a quick glance once in a while. I had no reason to be in there in all the years I worked there. I thought I could somehow catch a glimpse into her last moments, feel her very last breath being drawn if I stepped inside. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. It was very ordinary. The same walls, the same floor, same dim light, the same sink and washrags hanging around, like the room I worked in. It was small & stuffy unlike the large one I worked in. It felt safe, actually, not a place where someone died, not the place that held my friend’s body as she left this Earth forever, where just a moment before she was reading a newspaper and sipping out of a water bottle. And I couldn’t feel anything except the pang of seeing her newspaper she was reading the morning she died, still folded up on the table, and her water bottle half full next to it, right in the middle of seemingly safe mundane life when her heart decided to give out just out of the blue without warning. She woke up that morning just like any other, probably wearing a red or heart shirt for the holiday. She was like that. I wondered about the people who took her away, were they cold, compassionate, caring? Did they think of her as someone’s mom, someone’s friend, someone’s coworker, someone? Or was she just their job, just another body to be carried out? I wondered if they felt compassion for us, for those of us left here in pieces in the now dark cold place that she occupied here on Earth.
I remember the day we met. It wasn’t love at first sight, at least not for me. I thought she was unpleasantly sarcastic and obnoxious. She was yelling and cursing to (not at) a coworker, I just began the job, and she was already there a while, then she asked me a question about how much we were selling something for, and I said fifty cents or two for one dollar, I meant to say 75 cents or two for one dollar, and she said “Yeah, well no shit it’s two for a dollar.” 😆 But she quickly grew on me, and I came to love her and her funny sarcasm.
She was a loud, funny, sarcastic woman. Every other word out of her mouth was “Fck.” If she was angry at us, we knew it. She was extremely compassionate and fiercely loving but not what most would call sweet. She was always giving her last dollar to someone else. All three of her sons at one point wanted to date me, and two were arguing over me. She told me she would be honored to have me as a daughter-in-law but that I was too good for all three of them (and every other man out there). 😆 She was angry at her sons, yelling “Don’t you fcking dare even think about going near that sweet innocent little girl til you get your sh!t together!!! I’ll kick your @$$es!!!” Then she turned to me and yelled “Don’t you dare even think about it with them til they get their sh!t together, then choose one!!” 😆😆😆 They were very close so they were always at our work coming to talk to their mom or drive her home. She always affectionately referred to them as my Daniel, my Thomas, My Matthew. She would make me lunch and bring it to me.
When she would bake cookies or something at home, she would remember me and save me some. At work we would laugh and joke together. I was always texting my mom about the funny things Diane did and said, the kindness she would show to others even when she was angry. We worked at a food serving place. One night she went to Rita’s water ice when they were about to close. The worker wouldn’t give her water ice(if you don’t know what water ice is, because I think it’s a Philadelphia thing lol, imagine ice cream but not milky? Like flavored ice but soft. Something like that). He said he was closing. The next day he came to our place when she was working. I worked at the other side, and she worked at the kitchen side. He wanted food right as Diane was closing. She said “you know what, I shouldn’t give you sh!t after you were an @$$hole last night, but I will,” and she stayed open later and made him food even though the night before, he denied her when she wanted water ice. She got nothing extra out of staying later to make him food.
One day my dad came to my work acting like he was messing with me (he has a twisted sense of humor like that, a couple occasions he came to the store at night acting like he was pulling a gun/kn!fe on me and a bunch of men at the bar on the corner would come running over to tackle him and I had to embarrassingly tell them he’s my dad just joking, I really did have a gun pulled on me one night working alone, by a stranger, and he thought it was hilarious to joke about) and said “yo what are you doing” in a loud demanding voice. Diane was going by in a car, and not knowing it was my dad joking, she yelled out the car window, “She’s working!!! The f*ck’s it look like she’s doing?!” That’s just one of the many occasions she told someone off for me. She was very protective.
The last thing I ever heard her say was “Unfuckingbelievable!” Then she slammed a window closed in my face. I never saw her again. She was angry, but I love that this was our last encounter since we had to have a last encounter. It was so her and makes me laugh.
When I found out, my world collapsed.
A cold empty feeling came over me. It felt like some kind of constant in this life of mine was stripped away and like a lonely empty space now existed in the world that was once occupied by a warm loving presence. I could have never imagined a life without Diane. A world without Diane in it made no sense. She’s the closest person to me who ever died, and I wasn’t prepared. I lost another work friend before that, which was devastating, but we weren’t as close, and it could have never prepared me for this. I knew grief then, but this was different, like a boundless ocean. My other grief was intense. It was real and true but when compared to this grief, it seemed superficial, like just the surface of it.
The feeling I remember most is the feeling like I was missing a limb. It wasn’t physical pain but felt like missing an arm, like something essential to my body/life/existence was cut off in a traumatic accident or something and felt like a numbing, tingling sensation in its place. I couldn’t identify where the numbness was or the tingling, but it was somewhere. It felt deeper than body but also physical. I never knew a feeling like this exists. All day, everyday, there was this nagging sensation like part of me was physically missing when it shouldn’t be; it felt like it was ripped away, not cleanly cut or just misplaced, like it was physically, messily ripped off of me. Something about the element of surprise worsened it. It was a completely unexpected loss. Diane was healthy and middle aged. The other feeling I remember was literally struggling to breathe everyday for no reason. It felt like drowning or suffocating. When I was eleven years old, I couldn’t swim. I fell into a swimming pool at 12 feet deep, when no one saw. I remember the feeling of not being able to breathe, my arms and legs were flailing, my chest was caving in. When Diane died, I remembered that day in the swimming pool all those years before, it felt exactly the same. My body had the same physiological reaction. I remember writing this years ago and saying it’s not a metaphor, like it was physically the same. I had to stop at random parts of each day and gasp for breath. One morning a couple months after she died, around 2:00, I woke thinking I was having a heart attack too. I thought the grief was literally k!lling me. I couldn’t breathe and never experienced anything like it. My heart was palpitating, I felt like something was wrong with my face and struggled to get out of bed. I looked into a mirror, and my eyes were completely black, it was like two black endless pits instead of eyes. It looked scary, I never saw such a thing outside of horror movies. I began to have something like convulsions gasping and gasping, thinking my mom or sister would come and find me dead of a heart attack on the floor at 28years old.
Then I remembered that a panic attack can feel like a heart attack and thought maybe that’s what this is. I never had one before. I remembered panic attacks aren’t dangerous and won’t k!ll, just feel like they will. Back then I was a Buddhist student and remembered all the breathing and meditation techniques. I forced myself to breathe deeply and mindfully and envisioned a Buddha surrounded by bright wh!te light like we did in class, stopped it in its tracks almost instantly. That’s when I realized it was the beginning of a panic attack coming on. I never had one before or after that. But occasionally, rarely, I still have some anxiety rooted in her death. Before Diane died, I never had anxiety except claustrophobia.
I also frequently had this feeling like I wanted to scream her name hysterically until my throat was raw. I would imagine climbing with just my arms and legs up all the buildings in the city and getting to the top and screaming hysterically for her, screaming her name off all the rooftops. The pain felt like something throbbing. (I have a similar feeling to much of this when I have a pet who dies, but I expect them to, their little lives are so short and fragile, I don’t find it traumatic like this) My whole body was in throbbing pain(this is how I experience all grief). I used to lay on my bed or on my bedroom floor, curled up in a ball in agony on all levels, hugging myself trying to will the pain away. Until then, I never really realized that someone can just suddenly die even though I knew people before this who did. It stripped me of my sense of security. I felt like everyone I knew, especially my own mom, was going to just suddenly die on me without warning, and it filled me with dread and panic, kept me awake all night. My whole body was filled with trauma. Every moment I just kept thinking who is dying now, everyone I looked at I imagined them dropping of a heart attack, no control whatsoever. The ticker gives out for no reason whenever it feels like, even in young seemingly healthy people, and there isn’t a thing we can do to stop it or know it’s coming.
One day while sitting in the back of my dad’s car speeding on the highway, the throbbing was so relentless and urgent, I briefly, uncontrollably imagined opening the car door and letting myself fall into the traffic simply to stop it. It wasn’t depression or su*cidal. It was just a passionate throbbing of my entire existence that wouldn’t let up, and I had no idea what to do with myself.
I felt guilty for grieving so hard, for my body’s reaction. I felt like it wasn’t my place. She was just a work friend. I felt my grief was disproportionate to our relationship, not valid, that I wasn’t worthy of sympathy, that my grief wasn’t worthy of the place it was taking up in my body. I felt it wasn’t worthy of putting into words and out into the uni-verse, though I still did. I struggled to understand if it was a real thing or just a me thing. Unpleasant questions would intrude into my mind throughout the days. Would anyone else in my position have this reaction to such a loss, to losing “just” a friend, a coworker? Was it normal? Some kind of over attachment? Was I just being dramatic? Was I hijacking the grief of the real mourners? I knew people grieve for friends, coworkers, but mine felt not valid and too much for the situation, the fact that she wasn’t an outside of work friend made my grief seem disproportionate, and I do believe it’s even more difficult to lose a friend who is a friend in every aspect of life, not just work, both are painful and difficult. But some losses are more profound and challenging than others. This loss is terrible, for sure, but not the most profound or life altering someone can experience, like losing a spouse/life partner/child/friend who is like family in every way…Even though I knew it was real, it felt like it wasn’t, like it wasn’t mine, shouldn’t have been mine. It felt like it should have been reserved for someone else, someone more important than me, for her husband if he was still alive, for her sons, for her family or friends outside of work, like I had no right to it. I used to write about it a lot back then and often felt it was meaningless to because other people have experienced worse losses, and here I am complaining about the loss of a coworker. It seemed petty next to the loss others experience. But the pain and loss were so painful, nothing petty about it.
It’s a similar feeling when an online friend dies or even just someone we follow and don’t interact with but always seeing their content. We know our pain is real, but there’s that guilt, that nagging question, like is it really my loss? Is my grief real, valid, appropriate? Or should I step out of the way and let the real people have their grief? That would be easy and all well and good if the grief wasn’t nagging day and night, keeping us awake, insisting that it is in fact our own loss as well. If the loss and the love weren’t real to us, there would be no grief to ponder, but still it’s hard to embrace it as valid. If my grief wasn’t so intense and at some moments even v!olent, I wouldn’t have questioned the realness, the validity. Anyone can be sad when even a stranger dies. But this was a deep, heavy personal grief I did not feel entitled to. There are so many memories of just the two of us. Laughing, eating, joking, drinking hot chocolate together, listening to Rod Stewart… memories only I hold. Someone has to grieve for those lost moments and give them a place, honor them. Someone has to give them life. Who else can? We had a relationship, a connection, memories that only we shared, that were ours alone. No one else can grieve for that, only I can. Thinking this way makes it seem a little bit more valid.
I tried looking up things on Google about how to cope with the loss of a coworker to death, looking for something to validate my grief, and couldn’t find much at all. Google seemed to think I was looking for ways to support a grieving coworker and also suggested ways to support the family of our dead coworker. This hints at how it’s really not considered a significant/personal loss and hardly even worth mentioning. I looked it up again recently out of curiosity. I found two things for that specific loss but mostly just the same stuff as before and about grief and loss in general.
I always loved her, and I sensed she loved me too, and she was a significant part of my everyday for nearly ten years, even when we weren’t together, but as platonic friends and only at work, I wasn’t sure how valid our relationship was, how important it really was, not to us, but to anyone else, society in general, just whatever truth exists, I felt the grief, sympathy, should be reserved for real friends and family and couldn’t understand why I was reacting the way I was, felt I was overreacting, dramatizing my situation, but I couldn’t get it to stop. It was beyond my control. It was physical.
I remember writing that if I knew that last moment what was coming, I would have never let her go, would have slashed open my chest, cracked open my ribcage, if I could have, ripped out my own bleeding heart and handed it to her. And I would have.
Recently Instagram suggested I follow an account of a complete stranger. I loved the thumbnail picture I saw, a beautiful young woman and man on their wedding day. I love sweet posts like that so clicked her account just to see her love photos and was very surprised and dismayed to see in her bio, “widow.” At 26 years old! Part of my brain wouldn’t let me believe it at first, I knew it couldn’t be true at their age, but it is. I read her posts where she describes her grief after a tragic car crash, and I was surprised to see it somehow resembled the first couple years of my own grief, she described the missing limb feeling(I never heard anyone else say this), a feeling like part of her body missing, a feeling like drowning and suffocating, the physical sensations, the sense of panic and panic attacks. It was everything I remembered. I know hers is much worse, but so similar in some way. I could tell my grief wasn’t as profound, not as permeating, not as life altering, that there were layers and aspects missing even while the throbbing and aching were at their worst. Things I will never understand. And she mentioned something about not really understanding true grief or pain til you lose a husband and the father of your kids. And I do know what she means. It brought back that old feeling like I overreacted, that I had no place grieving, especially to such an extent, such depth over a friend, just a work friend. I felt guilty like I was taking off of someone else’s real grief and loss somehow by having my own experience. U.S. society and others, as a whole, favor romantic love/relationships and parent/child ones. Any other relationships/grief/loss/love…get pushed aside, and all the sympathy/validation tends to go to the spouse/romantic partner/child/parent. So it can sometimes be challenging to have intense grief for a different loss and see it as valid or even real. It feels guilty. It feels almost like being some kind of imposter, taking on the role of someone in mourning, someone broken over a shattering loss, when there is a more important person somewhere suffering even worse over the loss. No matter how much we suffer about a loss like this, there’s going to be someone else seemingly more entitled to that suffering. Ours will forever be overshadowed, dwarfed by theirs. It feels like playing make believe or playing house or dress up because we don’t yet or won’t ever know the real thing. It makes it seem insignificant yet the pain is still so heavy and real.
“Heaven knows,” (for lack of a better term), I never asked for or wanted that traumatic experience or deep deep pain, that panic. It came at me. I never wanted to lay on my floor at 3:00am, eyes black, wide awake, gasping for breath, shaking in agony & panic at the thought of never seeing her face again. And I will say, I don’t wish I was one of the important ones. I certainly don’t envy the girl who lost her husband or the son who lost his mom or the dad who lost his daughter. This “lesser grief” isn’t about wanting to be a part of it or wanting to play the role of a grief victim, a loss survivor, but is just a natural reaction to something that is a loss to us in its own context, its own way. I may not be an important one and maybe it’s much less in magnitude than a real mourner’s, but for whatever reason this loss is a devastating one, and grief will reflect that.
My grief nearly ten years later is no longer as prominent as it was. It’s a quiet, deep, ache that sometimes washes over me. Sometimes it’s still heavy enough to feel it could have potential to bring me to the ground, but that feeling is very brief when it hits. It used to be heavier, threatening to bring me down in random places, feeling as if my body would collapse wherever I was standing. Sometimes I would leave for a store and on the way feel I couldn’t go on and thinking I may have to turn around and go back home. It would hit anywhere, on a bus, walking up a street, in a grocery store. Sometimes it was more panic than pain, like a claustrophobic feeling, but feeling like the world is too large instead of too small, feeling like she’s lost out there somewhere and I would never find her. Thinking about her never seeing her sons again, never meeting her new grandbaby she told me everyday she couldn’t wait to meet when he was born, never tasting her favorite strawberry ice cream again, never listening to her favorite song, never again hearing her voice, my body would threaten to collapse. I no longer experience the fear, the panic, just the sadness part, but it’s almost never overwhelming, deep but not threatening. It’s more sadness now than unbearable pain. It can exacerbate sometimes and be especially deep, either randomly or something that reminds me of her. I often feel it in the beginning of Fall because it’s my favorite. I still have a slight sense of something being cut off, missing but mostly faint. I can tell it’s not going to fade any more than this. It’s a part of me now. It’s like background noise usually, unless I focus on it or something brings my attention to it. Writing this brought it all back. There are moments I desperately wish she was here, not necessarily always for me to see or talk to, but that she was here to get to live and have her favorite strawberry ice cream and listen to Rod Stewart, to watch her grandkids grow up and yell at her sons.
Anyway, I’m not even sure why I’m inspired to post this, but I am. Just seeing that girl’s grief so raw and so well articulated, took me back to my own, as I was reading, I was shaking my head in agreement and saying yup to myself, yet I haven’t a clue what it’s like for her as I haven’t suffered a loss like that. I would never think I know. But it felt like some underlying part is similar or maybe it’s the surface that is, I would never say that to someone struggling though, never ever would I say or even think “I know how you feel.” I know there are more layers and aspects to some losses than others even if the gist of it feels similar. Then I had that feeling all over again like it wasn’t valid or real even though I know it was real.
Since I met her I have spent as many years without her now as I have with her, but the years with her feel like much longer than the ones without, packed with so much experience, so many memories. It doesn’t even feel long since I last saw her. I can still remember her love all these years later. I never felt that I lost that. Losing her never meant losing that love.
She told me of all the amazing things in this life she wanted for me, love, my dream job, happiness…the main thing she hoped for me is that I would always keep my sweet and kind and gentle personality even in the face of challenges and encountering difficult people. She said one of her worst fears was me becoming cold hearted when I see how cold hearted the world can be. She told me to always stay kind & keep loving no matter what.
And I want to say to anyone reading this, if anyone is, I’m sorry for YOUR loss, the loss of your online friend, your coworker, the loss of your neighbor, the loss of your brother or sister or sibling, that’s not just your parents’ loss or their spouse’s and children’s, that’s YOUR loss. And it’s ok to grieve. There’s, unfortunately, enough grief for everyone.
…the rhythm of my heart Is beating like a drum With the words ‘I love you’ Rolling off my tongue ❤️
Just a random pic of me because I don’t know a good pic for this post. LoL 😆
“…and then I go and spoil it all by saying something stup!d like ‘I love you.'” 💕
LoL This song comes to mind when I think about this experience I’m sharing here with love & heartbreak. ❤️💔
That day I told a woman who was hardly even an acquaintance of mine that I loved her and wanted to spend forever with her….and got rejected. Ouch! 😆
😆 Check out, “Something Stupid,” sung by Frank Sinatra, here: (I have a thing for the Oldies lol 😁)
Trigger warning ⚠️: mentions depression and s*icidal ideation, nothing graphic. I’m generally and naturally very happy but am prone to depression on and off
If you see words that are censored like “s*x,” “wh!te,” “stup!d,”… it’s because these are either words that can be triggering to some people (like if they have trauma) or can be flagged on FB or some prefer them censored like to give a privileged majority less power, like wh!te people or men/m*n. I may post some excerpts of this post on FB, copying and pasting, and don’t want an FB suspension. lol It doesn’t mean I’m against something or a prude or just weird.Also, words like stup!d and d*mb are ableist. I admit I do use them in ways that aren’t against people with intellectual differences. They are still offensive to some though, and people can report them or FB can just detect certain things and we get flagged and thrown in the FB slammer. If FB feels thatmen or wh!te people are being “att*cked,” (because that’s a thing 😂 those poor men and wh!te people always being att*cked) theycan suspend our account. FB cannot always detect context and just see a word and flag.Also, there are lots of punctuation errors that I really don’t care to go back and fix because this took forever and so much emotional energy to write. I don’t have the emotional energy at the moment to go back through it. I already read it over n over n over. When I have the emotional energy again to re-read it to fix the errors, it may not be for months. And this has already taken like half a year to write. Lol
The YouTube videos may not show up, but I’m including them anyway. I saw something about YouTube issues and WordPress, not sure what it’s about, maybe some copyright thing.
(yes, the title is stolen off a popular book/film. 😆But this story is all mine.)
Today is Saturday, December 31st, 2022, the day I’m publishing this here, but it’s evening here in Philadelphia, so may say it’s January 1st, 2023.
I would like to share something that I have never shared before with anyone. It’s something that happened ten and more years ago. My experience with love & rejection. I tucked it away somewhere deep within and never fully revisited it again til recently. And what a ride it was going back in time and stirring up some old stuff!
Writing this gives me life. It makes me so happy to put all my pain and love into words. To give a voice to this experience that has haunted me for years. An experience that I thought ruined me for life. An experience I thought reduced me to less of the woman I was before her. But it actually gave me more depth, substance, and gave me a story. My own unique story. I am glad for it. I just can’t wait to put my story out into the uni-verse. To give it the space it’s worthy of. For years I thought it was something to keep all inside. I thought it was bad and wrong and humiliating and should be erased out of history. I thought it should die with me. But that’s not true. It’s part of me. It happened. It molded me into what I am. And it’s ok to give it space, to give it a name, to give it life.
Too many people, always heterosexual people that I know of, claim that love is a choice, that orientation, attraction…are choices. But I can say it’s not. We can choose to nourish it, dwell on it, work at it, keepit going, or we can choose to take steps to be less engaged in it and hope the worst of it eases if we can’t have the one/s we love. We can’t flip a switch and turn it off in an instant. But we can take a step back, distance ourself, focus on everything around us, giving the love space to take the backburner and possibly fizzle out eventually or at least become dormant so it’s not always on our mind. It becomes background noise then fades into the parts of the ourselves we rarely touch. This is my story of love & rejection & heartache, and a years long journey of healing.
Why am I sharing it now? Simply because I saw a survey where one of the questions asked non heterosexual people about their first heartbreak. Some people said they did not feel ready to share their experience of first heartbreak or it was too painful. My experience with first heartbreak is boring. Sad but boring. Lol I loved a girl who moved away and had to go to a different school. But it reminded me of this experience, one of the worst heartbreaks.
I want to bring visibility to the experiences of people like me, the way we can love, to share what it’s like to love as someone who isn’t the norm. My love story isn’t unique, who doesn’t get rejected or love someone and be afraid to speak up about it, right? (Actually there are people who don’t feel love and are called aplatonic, and they’re valid too! They experience all other emotions and care about people in an impersonal way but don’t feel actual love of any kind even for family, friends, pets– they care about the well-being of others and will take care of people they need to like their kids, just don’t feel love for them) But the kind of love I experience is a bit different than the norm. And I would like to share.
To understand my story, it may help to have some background knowledge of my identity so that’s what I’m explaining first. But it’s long. So if anyone is reading and wants to just skip to the story, there’s an image way below that says “Story time.” The story is under that.
I once told a woman I loved her and basically told her I wanted to spend forever with her. And….she rejected me! Ouch, ouch, ouch!! OUCH!!! She is the only woman I got up the nerve to confess my love for. Imagine the deep pain. The rejection wasn’t on good terms. She unfriended my account.
It was devastating and humiliating and took me years to recover and get over her. I became physically ill, and it took a serious emotional toll. I thought I would never survive it.
This love that I have experienced still has an impact on me all these years later. I don’t think it can be put into words how. It just shaped me in a way that can’t be explained. Even when I rarely to never thought about it, the effect on me was always here. It’s an integral part of me. I wouldn’t be all that I am without it. It’s just one thread in the tapestry of my existence. It’s also a reflection of me, of that way that I can love, and the way I react to that love. I can’t say I’m wholeheartedly glad for the experience, but I also don’t wish it never happened.
I can tap into that love and that pain when I think about all those years ago. I can summon the thrill and the desire. I can get giddy when I let myself thoroughly remember how I loved her even though I don’t love her like that anymore, how I ached for her, how at one point, I believed she would be mine, the deep deep joy she brought me, the happiness her smile inspired in me. And I love feeling all the feels again, all these years later, but now with a barrier that wasn’t there before, a barrier that lets me experience without being too emotionally involved like before, to the point it’s destructive or agonizing. I can feel it all again without drowning in despair like all those years ago. I just love it. There are still old love songs that remind me of her. But they are no longer painful.
Though they can stir a wistful feeling and a feeling of missing that experience.
It was as beautiful as it was painful.
Writing this was not painful for me. There were a few occasions I experienced yearning, and other occasions, I was like reliving painful memories, but overall, it wasn’t a painful thing to write. I was more amused than anything, thinking of my young, clingy, desperate self back then. 😆😆😆 And there were lots of bellylaughs thinking back to all the funny things she said. I have been working on this post off & on since the beginning of June. Some occasions while writing and rereading this, I have wished things turned out differently, but ultimately don’t care.
I do admit that throughout it I kept thinking about what could have been if only… and experiencing a kind of yearning, and also have experienced fear about the fact that I can’t say for sure if I ever saw her again or saw a picture of her or even just her name, those emotions, that incredibly passionate desire for someone I can’t have, won’t come flooding back. I loved her and wanted her with a passion that can’t be put into words. The rejection and the loss brought me unspeakable pain. The loss of possibility and the loss of her online friendship. The loss of joy she brought me just to look at a picture of her smile. I knew her in person at one point but we were then just online friends.
Time has placed so much distance in the middle of us there is a protective barrier that won’t allow those old emotions to touch me in a raw way any longer. But every now and again as I wrote and reminisced , I felt curiosity, taunting me like a mischievous child egging on another child, whispering to me, “Go ahead, look her up again.” And I felt the possibility of a dam deep within me, threatening to break and unleash all the passion and pain and joy and despair and beauty and yearning of some long ago I forgot existed until recently, threatening to pull me under, like quicksand, drowning me in all the love and grief and longing, I thought I thoroughly let go all those years ago, threatening to capsize me, as if I were a lone sailboat on a deserted island, pulling me into some whirlpool until I submerge. It is not in my best interest to go on a search for her. But temptation can be quite hard to resist should I let it get out of hand. I’m trying my best to keep it at bay so I don’t go and spoil it all by doing something stup!d and finding her and letting myself love and covet her all over again, undoing all the healing and indifference to her that I worked so hard for years, to reach.
The allure of that potential thrill all over again, enticing me. I almost crave it, that youthful giddiness, the joy just a glimpse of her brought to me. The intoxication.
The ecstasy, so tempting.
But then I remember.
The agony.
And I know what’s good for me.
Curiosity k!lled the cat.
I am an asexual aromantic (aroace) woman with what are known as “lesbian leanings/tendencies.” I only came to understand this around three years ago, at thirty -three years old. When we don’t experience a basic emotion or attraction that nearly everyone else in the world does, it’s hard to pinpoint the fact that we don’t. We usually know something is going on (or not going on 😆), but can’t really say what.
Please do not ask me about my “symptoms” or “diagnosis.” I’m not sick. I don’t have symptoms and was not diagnosed. I don’t “have” asexuality. I AM asexual. It’s my identity, part who I am. I’m so over the microaggressions of ignorant, even if well intentioned, people.
Aromantic means I don’t experience romantic attraction. And asexual means I don’t experience sexual attraction. I don’t “catch feels” in the traditional sense. I have never been into dating and don’t get crushes. Not all aromantic people are asexual. We can be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual/pansexual…
Romantic relationships have always seemed very “other” to me, something I never understood, something I don’t have access to. I never fully understood why people cry over romantic breakups but could if they did over friendship loss. I always saw romantic love as inferior and saw two friends in a movie falling in love as a downgrade. I would be offended when male friends of mine would fall for me, romantically, thinking they now loved me less or were using me. I knew on some level but did not consciously know or know how to articulate that I do not experience romantic attraction/love. I don’t experience the beauty of it so did not realize all along that romantic love/attraction isn’t inferior to platonic. I see looking back how my aromanticism has interfered with my empathy. Not compassion, I still felt sorry and wished people the best when they had romance problems but couldn’t quite get it. I did not understand why divorce is so painful and considered terrible. I thought surely losing a best friend of even only a few months after an argument is WAY worse than losing a husband to divorce after 30 years. It’s “just” romantic! I understand now after learning of my own aromantic identity. I have no idea what it feels like but now understand better intellectually. I always wondered why everyone is so obsessed. I used to think it’s “just” romantic. Now I understand.
And asexual people can be homoromantic, aromantic, heteroromantic, biromantic…I turned out both asexual and aromantic but have strong homoromantic leanings(this is just what I call them). I only understand sexual attraction as a concept. I have never felt it, myself. I grew up feeling that something is off and missing but couldn’t say what. No one explains what sexual attraction or desire is because everyone assumes everyone will begin to feel it and just know. But one percent of us don’t. And we grow up usually feeling broken and mortified and confused. We don’t experience it to understand all the vague references we hear around us. I had no idea in a defined way that there is a feeling (sexual desire/being horny) that nearly everyone feels and that that is what’s driving people to seek sexual activity. Of course I heard talk about it and references but since I don’t experience it had no idea exactly what is going on. So there’s a feeling that most people get making them want sexual contact with someone else’s body, can be a specific person or just a feeling of I want s*x. Amazing! I was so confused for so long. Imagine if everywhere you go people are kissing blank wh!te walls and ohh and ahhing over these walls and obsessed and all they talk about are these walls and can’t keep their hands off the walls and you’re just like wth, what is driving this? No one tells us there’s a feeling nearly everyone else has that some don’t. Weliterally have no idea what “she’s hot/sexy” means. We think it means pretty and often don’t understand how that makes someone want sexual activity with the person. To us, it’s like looking at a beautiful sunset, to see a pretty person.
I did not know til somewhat recently that romantic feelings almost always include sexual feelings and that most couples engage in sexual activity with each other, like that it goes without saying if we meet a romantic couple, they do or at least have together, or that someone can become physically aroused or have a fluid reaction in their pants (I laughed hysterically upon finding this out and had to ask my little sister if it’s true – she confirmed it is – so so glad I’m ace!!). I did know most people have sexual feelings and get it on, just did not realize the extent to which romantic automatically also includes/means sexual. It’s very common asexual people don’t realize this because again, no one explains it in detail as everyone assumes we all experience it or will. We grew up not having this experience so don’t have our own experience to reference like most do. Thank goddess I’m ace.
Most asexual people are s*x indifferent or repulsed and don’t want it with anyone. I am s*x repulsed with men. Gag me with a spoon already!! And s*x indifferent with women. No thanks, don’t want it, but the thought of it doesn’t make me want to crawl out of my skin and get like fifty showers. LoL I pretended to like men to not be seen as a freak. The thought that I had to grow up and date, touch, bang, marry men, or be seen as a freak, would sometimes trigger s*icidal depression in me.
Asexuality.org
I experience emotional, sensual, and aesthetic attractions to women only, and no attraction to men. I don’t experience sexual attraction to anyone or any sexual desire at all, never have. I understand it only intellectually. I never felt it firsthand. We are usually born this way. It does not mean no physical libido. If an asexual person has a physical libido, for most, it doesn’t translate to “I want s*x.” It’s just a physical sensation.
I have never felt the feeling of “I want s*x.” I have no idea what that must feel like. This used to bring me so much anxiety and humiliation. Not that itself but what others would think and not being able to relate. I used to pretend to feel it so people wouldn’t think I’m a freak. I would google what does it feel like so I can try to seem to fit in. Even as an adult. Reading about it did not help me understand firsthand. For me to understand what sexual desire must feel like I imagine being hungry and emotionally wanting food along with the physical sensation of hunger. I can’t imagine it though for someone else’s body. Sometimes if I haven’t had much food for at least two days, I am ravenous and could devour food in a second. One day I got soup at wawa after having almost no food for a couple days. I was shoveling it into my mouth walking up Market street thinking this is what horny must be like but for someone else’s body. I kind of understand to a point. Also, I can be “horny” for hugs or cuddles with another woman, either a specific one or just wishing there were another woman with me to touch, and use that as a reference to imagine if it were sexual. It helps a bit.
Indication of asexuality 😆
Romantic and sexual attractions usually go together for the average person but asexual and aromantic people may experience one and not the other. It makes sense to us even if it doesn’t to you. I understand most people don’t separate and can’t imagine how they can be separated, but an asexual person may look at someone and fall in love, get butterflies, all the feels, want to get married, just not have sexual feels for the person or anyone. You know how little elementary school aged kids can get a little crush on another kid that of course isn’t sexual but is different than how they like their friends? You know how a little girl can blush over a little boy and think he’s cute in a way she doesn’t with any friends she plays with? Some of us stay this way all throughout adulthood, the sexual never manifests. It’s always I want to hold her hand, cuddle her, do life together…but the sexual never develops.
And aromantic people may look at someone and think wow sexy, I want to hit that but not have those warm sappy romantic feels, no desire to date or get married.
What I am can be referred to as an aroace lesbian or bambi lesbian (isn’t this adorable? LoL). I’m a bit hesitant to usethese terms though because real lesbians sometimes get offended (though I think most don’t mind, and see us as valid). They say it invalidates them or that there’s no suchthingor that they suffer more than us because of their sexuality (how society regards them) and we shouldn’t invalidate that by using their label, lesbian.And stuff like that.They say we should just admit we want a girl best friend and nothing “more.”Asexual flag 🖤💜
I always could sense that something is present in everyone else and not me. A few years ago, I learned more about asexuality. I always knew about it since a teenager but did not realize sexual attraction is what I lack to realize it’s me. People have always sensed something is different about me and I have been ridiculed and mocked and called “prude, virgin” and stuff. I used to be s*icidal sometimes because I thought I was the only one like this and couldn’t explain it. I kept it a deep, dark secret. I always felt kind of gay but nahh.
😂
I remember occasionally secretly wishing I was gay so I can have a woman instead of a man. 😆 Women are soft, lovely, delicate, and warm. They are kissable and cuddly and adorable. Men are not. LoL And women (even bad@$$ babes) usually have a sensitivity, a gentleness, about them that even the most sensitive men don’t. It’s just the nature is so different. I always secretly wondered why women are intomen when other women exist.Like why are you looking at him when there’s a gorgeous babe right over there?! 😂
In case anyone needs convincing. 😆 (It’s me!) You’re telling me you would prefer to cuddle and look at a man over this?? 😭
It’s a common misconception that aromantic asexual people cannot feel emotions very very deeply for other people and cannot experience heartbreak. We absolutely can. There are other ways to love than just romantic and sexual. Not all aromantic people experience emotional attraction or deep friendship love, but many do.
I can fall deeply in love (with women) like it’s my job. 😆 Lol I’m always catching girl crushes everywhere I go (girl crushes are platonic – heterosexual women can get them too lol).It’s just not romantic.
How cute is this?! 💕
My love story, below, is about alterous attraction, a very intense emotional attraction that many aromantic people experience in place of romantic.
Alterous attraction/love, just like romantic/sexual, is not a choice.
People of any sexual orientation may experience it, but it’s usually aromantic people, I think. If you’re not aro and you develop deep feels for someone, you’re probably just going to go all out and catch full on romantic feels. LoL 😆
Here is what alterous attraction is:
“Alterous attraction is a type of attraction, much like romantic or sexual attraction. However, this term describes the desire to be emotionally close to someone in a way that is neither exclusively platonic nor wholly romantic, but rather somewhere in the middle. Some describe it as the orientation related to the grey area between platonic and romantic attraction, and it is sometimes described as simply ‘the intense desire for (emotional) closeness.’ This term is often used within and associated with the aro-ace community. As mentioned in the introduction, alterous refers to a way of feeling attracted to someone similar to platonic and romantic attractions. This means that one form of being attracted to someone can exist parallel to another: someone can, for instance, be bisexual, aromantic, and panalterous. Alterous attraction – much like romantic – uses the prefixes hetero-, homo-, a-, pan-, etc.
You can also speak of an alterous orientation, which, much like its sexual or romantic counterparts, is defined by whom you are attracted to in this way; as such, who you want to be emotionally close with, determines what your alterous orientation is. The alterous counterpart to a crush is called a squish, a hush, or a mesh. These terms are not, however, very widely used.
Alterous is derived from the same root as words such as ‘to alter’ or ‘an alternative.’ All these words come from the same Latin root of ‘alternare,’ which means ‘to change, to interchange.’ As such, in a literal sense, the term could be defined as ‘a descriptor for an alternative type of attractions’ or just ‘other attractions.’“
So that’s alterous attraction! It’s like I want you as my person but doesn’t really have to be defined as platonic or romantic.
I always thought that this alterous attraction I experience was like a strange quirk of mine, never realized it’s a real thing and more experience it. Since I was a young girl, I would daydream about having two women (not necessarily any specific women, though sometimes) who were close to me and my most important people. One would be like a sister and the other would be a bit different. This one I would imagine myself hugging more and holding hands with, being each other’s main person, connecting more emotionally with. I couldn’t understand the difference in my head and why I longed for both if both are platonic. I used to imagine both of them having a romantic partner since most eventually do, and I thought that’s how it’s always going to be. Turns out the one is alterous! It can be called having a mesh instead of having a crush. The platonic one is called having a squish on someone, meaning wanting to be very close platonic friends, not just liking someone platonically but actively wanting a very close friendship with the person. I only get these on women/women aligned people, though I can definitely be close friends with a man. It can’t reach the depth I can have with a woman though.
I am homoalterous– deep emotional attraction to other women that can inspire me to want a very close relationship to them that isn’t quite romantic but closer or more interconnected thanplatonic usually is. It’s usually aromantic people who experience it (though not all do) in place of romantic attraction.
homoaesthetic many asexual people experience aesthetic attraction in place of sexual, we can want to check them out and stare them up and down, but it doesn’t have a sexual aspect or trigger physical arousal – I can stare at women/fem presenting people all day long
I got this bruise because a large puppy at work jumped on me!
lesbisensual – sensual attraction to only other women, cuddles, kisses, hand holding, skin caresses, massages…Only women are cuddly and kissable to me Most people experience sensual attraction along with romantic and sexual attractions. But some aromantic/asexual people can experience it without those other attractions. Like I don’t want to date or bang you but we can cuddle and kiss (keep that tongue in your mouth though eww lol) and lay together all night. LoL I don’t kiss with the tongue but will give sweet kisses all over
aromantic, asexual – I don’t like anyone sexually or romantically
I identify as a lesbian oriented aroace or aroace lesbian or bambi lesbian (a lot of actual lesbians seem to know what a Bambi lesbian is, but most people do not). Or sometimes just asexual lesbian when I’m not up for explaining the complicated (to others, not to me) thing of all the attractions or aspects. Some people cannot grasp the whole thing but can grasp “lesbian who just isn’t into s*x.” Though, seems most cannot even grasp that. If I was in a brief social situation where it’s just not convenient to get into the whole thing, lesbian is good enough. I don’t mind people just thinking I’m a gay woman. Though I like to bring visibility to my actual identity. And if I’m going to be close to people, it would be good if they eventually know what I am.
People tell me how “lucky” I am to be asexual because I’ll “never know true heartbreak.” They have no idea. Just because love isn’t sexual doesn’t mean it isn’t love or is less deep. No, I did not want to see her with no clothing on or play with each other’s junk/swap bodily fluids, never pictured her naked, and was never aroused by her. None of my daydreams or fantasies of her (and I had many) were even slightly sexual, ever. Sensual (cuddles, holding close, hair strokes..), but not sexual. But I would have taken a bullet for her even if I wasn’t a universal lover who would do that for just about anyone. The years it took me to recover. I was in shambles. Thought I would never ever be whole again.
I knew her in person for like two years, then never saw her in person again but came across her around four years later online (I stayed in love with her those four years of not seeing her at all in person or online, carried a flame all those years, frequently thinking of her, it would mellow out a bit on occasion, take the back burner then come back strongly) and became online friends, not really interacting much with each other, though we did have a few online chats on her posts. Sometimes I would respond to something she posted, and she would respond to me leading to a conversation. A while after becoming online friends and exchanging a few comments and likes here and there, I sent her two long messages, basically telling her I loved her and just how strong my love for her was, how I loved her for years, how I thought of her frequently and was so inspired by her and made better because I knew her. She did not respond and unfriended my account. I kept looking at hers for two years after that(update, actually it was three years). Then stopped because it was too painful, but still thought about her and loved herfor acouple more.I thought about her frequently and wished she was mine. I think I mentioned somewhere that I still lived a happy life, just carried this pain, love, and longing for a few years.It would wax and wane til it began to fade and then fizzle out completely.
I’m going to correct a mistake here. I think a couple places throughout this writing I mention that I stalked her account for two years then for three more years after that still actively loved her but stopped looking at her social media accounts, just frequently thought of her. Actually I stalked her social media/YouTube/blog accounts for THREE years after the rejection and then stopped and actively loved her for two. lol I remember now being 30 years old (just over three years after sending her the long messages of my undying love) and having a new job (my current job!) as a pet nanny and looking at her accounts thinking she would be impressed by my new job because she loves animals too. lol I remember thinking if only she would give me a chance, she would see how we both love them and I work with them now. She was always posting pictures of her cat and chihuahuas. One day my boss did not put my schedule on yet for the next day, and it was late into the night already and I thought maybe I lost my new job already and he never said (that wasn’t it, he just never got around to it yet lol But back then I had anxiety over every little thing about it as it was a new job I wasn’t accustomed to yet). I remember looking through her Instagram account, sitting on the stairs in my house, looking at her beautiful face, thinking what would she think of me that I couldn’t hold my new job. She was a safe person and lost jobs herself so I knew she would actually have compassion and understanding but still wished I could have kept the job and get to tell her all about it. It was after that that I stopped stalking her online but still loved her deeply for a couple more years. I stopped for a while first then caved and went back to it, then stopped completely. It has been four years since I actively loved her. But it feels like much longer. I don’t feel like going back and correcting my mistakes where I messed up on the years so just clearing that up here. lol
Trigger warning ⚠️: mention of r*pe, not my experience but hers
Here is my true story.
It was September.
And it was love at first sight.
She was laughing when I first saw her across the room. The gentle fluorescent light, playing up the highlights in her hair. I was instantly drawn in by her physical beauty. It caught me off guard. I see beautiful women everywhere and am distracted and moved. But this one was especially beautiful. She was breathtaking. I couldn’t peel my eyes away.
And her playfulness added to it. She was laughing and joking when I first encountered her. The way she threw her head back and laughed deeply, hysterically at something simple someone said, I was spellbound. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. It was like the rest of the world fell away and there was only her. And she was all I wanted, all I needed.
Even as I write this now, I feel a stirring of sorts in my chest as I remember that feeling and how it was just the beginning of what would become a tumultuous years long journey of passionate love, longing, ecstasy, and agony.
I found myself moving to get closer to her. To breathe her air, to bask in her ways, to better hear her voice. I made my way over without being noticed. I found myself staring, smiling ear to ear. I remember thinking somewhere deep within that this one was made to be mine.
I just felt she was going to have some significance in my world. And she did. She wrecked my world completely. Brought me to ruin. I thought I would never recover, never claw myself out of the debris of my crumbled life and self.
She was a small, wh!te woman, with messy, wavy brown hair that fell, softly, to her shoulders. Brown/green eyes. Maybe hazel, if I remember correctly. I can’t believe I don’t really remember. But I remember they were warm and loving.
I could tell she was quite a bit older than me, around forty years old, so almost twenty years (I was a 20 something college girl) but I am not someone who feels an age difference when interacting with people older than me, even when I was a young woman/girl. I don’t typically see people as “older people” unless they’re like old old, like maybe 80 something years old. The age difference never fazed me.
She wore glasses and looked adorable. She came off as humble and welcoming. Her clothes were what some may call “frumpy,” loose, sweat kind of clothes. I found it pleasing. Later I found that she also dressed up a lot, in girly, dressy clothes. But she had no problem dressing down in public, sometimes even when she would attend conferences and give speeches in front of lots of people, she would dress in sweat clothes. She would laugh about it and say how terrible she looked (she totally did not!). I found her even more beautiful dressed down with no makeup, hairmessy.
There was something sophisticated seeming about her. She had an air about her. I already got the feeling she was intellectual, intelligent, before I knew anything about her. The way she carried herself, the book bag around her shoulder, the book in her arms. She seemed deep and aware. I was correct. I later found out she was a teacher/college instructor, and writer and editor for some blogs and local news articles. She did workshops on writing and stuff like that. There was no hint of arrogance whatsoever. She was very successful with education and career. She did not have much money or health insurance though and felt this was an indication of being a failure in life.
I could tell she had a sense of humor because of her frequent, wholehearted laugh while interacting with people. This was something I fell in love with right away. A woman who can laugh, and deeply, with abandon. She was very social. Extroverted. She touched people frequently, pats on the back, hand on their arms. Reaching out to pull someone aside if she wanted to talk to them. She laughed at everything they said, joked, playful insults back and forth with the people she was with, funny sarcasm.She was witty and could take a joke. She loved risque jokes and inappropriate stuff, like I do, and wasn’t easily offended. She could be a perv like me. LoL
This, along with her physical attractiveness, made her irresistible to me. She had a soft smile on her face when I first saw her. She wasn’t looking at me and did not even know I was there. I felt something instantly for her. I wanted to make her mine. I knew I had to know more.
One day, I found her singing. Her voice was soft, soothing, gentle, like the voice of an angel, caressing all the depths of my being. Hauntingly beautiful. I could tell her singing was inspired by a place of deep pain. Not temporary pain. I could tell she knew a life of persistent or recurring pain. I don’t remember the words. The words weren’t important. It was the soft melancholy ache in her voice, in the passion of her song. It was as if there was a wellspring of sorrow within her, driving that kind of singing. It resonated with the ache in me. I had no idea she could sing like that. She was also able to pull off various accents. Very talented in so many ways.
I remember her talking about how she was always attracted to blonde girls and also jealous of them. She always wished she had blonde hair. She always felt like blonde haired girls were inherently more beautiful than her and out of her league and always saw them as stuck up. She was secretly in love with a pretty blonde haired girl in high school. I remember she would tell stories about unpleasant encounters with blonde haired girls and she would say “well ok, Blondie” or “f*ck you too, Blondie.” It made me laugh. (Maybe I had the wrong hair color all along 😆)
I thought she was perfect.
And this made me love her.
I got to know her more and more and realized she wasn’t perfect.
And this made me love her so much more.
She was perfect to me.
Perfect for me.
She’s the one I wanted by my side for the rest of this life.
Arrogantly, I thought I was perfect for her too and that she would agree. This is where I went so so wrong and suffered immense heartbreak. For years I thought she broke it, but it was all my own doing, letting myself be so dependent on the expectation that I would be someone to her when in reality she wanted nothing at all to do with me. And the not knowing why and the wondering nearly k!lled me.
I remember that feeling. The feeling that I found her. It stirs something in me now. It’s not her anymore who gives me that feeling, just the memory making emotions resurface, and the fact that it can happen again as I have the ability to experience this. A kind of nostalgic and anticipatory thrill. And I like it.
She was everything I thought she was and more. Compassionate. Intellectual. Deep. Hilarious (like incredibly hilarious, I imagined us laughing for hours together). Just as beautiful on the inside as the outside. Political. Progressive. Educated. Determined. Strong. All this and more. She was generally respectful while engaging with people who were difficult or ignorant, but she could be snarky and snippy.
I found myself on occasion, wondering how this incredible woman wasn’t already mine. How on Earth I’m just finding her now. It felt that we have and should have already known each other for years (I told her that once online, and she liked my comment). I’m not a believer in an afterlife of any sort but truly, I felt I have loved and known her in life after life. That we were bound together, made for each other by the heavens above, some cosmic force or magic holding us together.
I thought of her frequently when she wasn’t around. She was always on my mind. Whenever our paths crossed, I was overjoyed and ecstatic. My whole body would become energized. I would get giddy for the rest of the day and not know what to do with myself. I never told anyone about my secret love. Not family or close friends. I had no idea how to explain it. I wanted her as my person. My one for life. It wasn’t confusing. It made sense to me. But there was no word for it. No word for the kind of love I felt for her, the kind of relationship I wanted with her. (Turns out, there is! Alterous or queerplatonic, but those terms weren’t around back then) I knew it wasn’t romantic.
I loved her and wanted her to be mine. And that was all. I wanted her by my side all life long. It wasn’t the traditional “I want to date her” or “take her out” and there were no thoughts of “building a future together” or living together or even “growing old together.” And there was nothing sexual about it at all.
Even as time went on, I did not ever imagine us ever living together or adopting dogs together (we both did not want kids but always dogs & cats), or going on vacations together (she loved vacations to other countries and stuff and I never thought of wanting to join her), my daydreams and fantasies were more like visiting each other, sleeping over (non sexually, but like staying up all night talking and reading together, laying in bed together, in each other’s arms, curling up on a sofa and watching movies, drinking tea) with each other, walking around the city doing what we love, my fantasies often became sensual (cuddles, hand holding, head on each other’s shoulders, holding her close…I don’t have this inclination for most people, and never for men. This is something I found a bit curious since I was identifying as hetero but could tell I’m not gay or not fullblown and this did not seem very hetero) But nothing sexual ever even crossed my mind(for her or anyone else in all of my 36 years).
I would often try to suppress the sensual desire/daydreams/fantasies because it seemed to contradict the label I was identifying as, heterosexual. The whole thing seemed to contradict it, but there was no denying my love for women. Heterosexual women don’t usually want a defined, long-term sensual relationship with another woman or fantasize, sensually, about other women. They may be physically affectionate in general with their women friends, but that’s different, and I could tell on some level. So I would just try to go easy on the sensual fantasies/feelings. Sometimes I would imagine women crying and me trying to comfort with holding and back rubs and hair strokes…it was my excuse to imagine touching another woman but being normal about it. I did not realize til some self exploration a long while later that that’s why l would frequently imagine women crying and me comforting them. It was really that I wanted to touch them but wasn’t ready to face that. Of course, I can comfort women that way and it’s one hundred percent just consoling. Just in my head, I wanted a valid/acceptable reason for fantasizing about other women and believed simply wanting to touch them in sensual/emotional ways wasn’t both because of homophobia and the fact that I’m not fully gay and did not understand it back then.
(This repression of what I am, deeply wounded me, and only somewhat recently have I begun to realize and consciously feel the full extent of how wounded I am, growing up being told by everyone and society as a whole that I had to love and touch men. To constantly be asked “Do you have a boyfriend/husband?” “What do you look for in a man?” Men just asking me out and coming onto me without knowing/checking if I even like men. People just assuming any male friend of mine is a boyfriend/romantic/sexual interest.
They gave me no space or permission to love other women or to love no one at all the way society is so hung up on everyone loving. To have to suppress and repress so much of myself, an essential part of me, because society says girls should necessarily love boys, and boys only, is deeply painful. To suppress and repress my inclination for other women. And to have to suppress my asexuality and pretend to be sexual is deeply painful and mortifying. So often, I was humiliated and feeling as if I was going against my own nature just pretending. It’s just so unnatural and so repulsive to imagine loving, touching, pining for a man.)
I daydreamed about accompanying her to all events she attended. I wanted to be the one she automatically brought everywhere with her, without even being asked. Like it’s just understood, if she gets an invitation to a wedding, I’m her “plus one/date.” I don’t have this inclination with friends in general. It wasn’t in a clingy way. I wanted to be hers, and those things come along with being someone’s.
I wanted everyone to automatically think of the other one of us when they saw or thought of one of us. I wanted everyone to know we belong to each other. I thought of it as them thinking of us as super close best friends, even closer than most best friends. That’s how I wanted us to be forever.
I remember thinking she was so so amazing and beautiful that people would be impressed by me that she was mine, that they would think how lucky I was to have this beautiful amazing woman by my side, always. That’s not why I wanted her, but I admit I did like the idea of everyone being amazed by me because I got her. I thought they would all wonder how I got so lucky. I wanted to show her off to everyone, to show the world what was mine.
I wanted to know each other deeply and be extremely emotionally invested in each other for the rest of forever. I wanted to tell each other everything and know each other in and out. To be each other’s main person and source of emotional connection. I still wanted some boundary though, to have separate lives. I did not want anything to do with each other’s finances or living situations. And it wouldn’t have mattered to me if she was in a romantic relationship as long as there was room in her heart and life for me. I did not want to be “as one” or do things “as a couple.” I don’t have this inclination for anyone. There goes the aro in me!
The love I had for her was different than the love I had for my close friends. It was more “obsessive” (not literally legit obsessed but for lack of a better word, maybe “invested” is better lol) and layered and had a physical effect on me. It energized me and sometimes made my heart race. I can have thiswhen I experience deep platonic love/attraction but only for women. I get the biggest girl crushes! LoL When I get girl crushes, they aren’t sensual. What I had for this woman can be. Also, I don’t typically daydream about spending nights together when it’s platonic like when I have an alterous “crush” or love thing going on. I can imagine falling asleep with a woman and waking up, spending the morning in bed just laying close, touching non sexually. Very sensual but not sexual. When I love a woman in a soul sister kind of way, it’s just as deep and consuming but not sensual or anything like that.Alterous, for me, is like platonic based but hints of romantic traits maybe, or hints of something that is akin to romantic but not full-blown.I can accept if someone is more important to them than I am if I’m still up top on their list but prefer if I’m their #1. Lol
Eventually, as my emotional attraction to her deepened, it inspired sensual inclination, wanting to wrap my arms around her, kiss her cheek, stroke her hair….There was no swooning or butterflies or magnetic feeling. There was no feeling in the gut like a rollercoaster, even when I first met her. I did not feel like I would go insane or explode on days I did not see her. I did go out of my way to try to see her though and hope to see her again soon. There wasn’t really a feeling of like “wanting to be around her literally all the time” like people say romantic attraction is like. It was more like just wanting to know we are each other’s person throughout life and see each other often.
I very much looked forward to seeing her again, but it wasn’t a feeling like I just have to absolutely be around her, constantly. I wanted us to be important enough to each other that we saw each other frequently and loved her company and missed her when she wasn’t around me. But it wasn’t exactly the same as the romantics talk about. I could bear to be apart for a while as long as I knew I would see her again and that we were each other’s.
Just seeing her for part of a day was enough to carry me for the rest of the day and into the next. But there was a deep deep longing to belong to each other, to be each other’s everything(I have always wanted to be someone’s everything but knowing I likely never would be as someone who doesn’t experience romantic love; even before I understood this in a conscious way, I knew, and I knew that society favors sexual/romantic love and relationships. While I accept it in general, it has often brought me so much pain to know I will never be wholeheartedly loved because even if someone loves me, there will always be someone more important, a more important kind of love that I cannot feel. It’s like society telling me I am inherently flawed and unlovable, even as a little girl, this crushed me There are occasions it feels like being inadequate as a person or a human or as a woman or as a life partner or potential life partner to someone, because of lacking something so fundamental and essential to everyone else. Sometimes I’m in a low mood and someone compliments me, on my physical beauty or my personality, my love and care for animals, my kindness…and I’ll just think so what, that doesn’t make up for not being adequate for the most important relationship {romantic/sexual} to society. It doesn’t make up for being unlovable, undatable {not that I’m looking to date, but it’s not pleasant to be told that} I’m regarded as an inferior human, sometimes not even human. People have told me things to suggest this, and it’s just society’s message in general. Some people straight up say we aren’t human.).
I loved the secret longing. It gave me a thrill, particularly because there was always that possibility we would eventually belong to each other. After the rejection, years later, that thrill was mostly gone, the thrill she may someday be mine and was replaced by deep pain, sometimes life draining pain, but the thrill of loving her and knowing someone so beautiful exists, remained. I would see her, randomly, and make it a point to walk by her, hoping she would notice and think I’m pretty or interesting. But she never did. If I would see her walking a certain direction, I would walk that way, hoping to run into her. If I saw her having lunch with people, I would sit close by, hoping she would notice, and also just to be in her presence.
But she did not really know I existed(literally she did but it felt like she did not). When I met her face to face, she did not seem as smitten with me as I was with her. She seemed to like me, just not actively interested in being my friend, it seemed. She was polite and friendly with me, but nothing more. I was very shy and did not know how to initiate anything and was too shy to often begin conversations with her. Once in a while I got up the nerve to try but did not know how to really express how interested in her I was, did not know how to form a friendship. All my friends were people who showed interest in me first and introduced me to their friends and then we became friends. This woman did not show interest in being more than an acquaintance, if even that. Sometimes she would see me and come to say hello and ask how I am. She would sometimes tell me what kind of day she was having or plans for her Saturday night (which was often staying at home reading a book/watching a movie and drinking wine). I would ask her questions about herself or her day/weekend, and she would respond and ask me a couple things, and that would be it. It never went anywhere, and I did not know how to direct it somewhere.
If you’re romantically interested in someone, you can ask them on a date or even to be your girlfriend. If you have a coworker you really like as a platonic friend, you can ask if they want to get together for coffee or a drink after work. But I had no idea what I even wanted her to be to me(definitely wasn’t thinking in terms of “girlfriend.”). My person? My woman? My love? My everything? All of that. But I could tell it wasn’t romantically driven. I can hardly walk up to a woman I hardly know (And actually even if we do know each other but aren’t very close) and ask her to be my everything. LoL
We did not really know each other in the context where I could ask to hang out or something, like if we were coworkers or something. Even then, I likely wouldn’t have had the nerve. Some people would be bold enough to ask someone to hang out in the context in which I knew her, but I wasn’t. Sometimes I would plan on meeting up with her, chatting, then asking if she would like to exchange phone numbers. It wouldn’t have been completely bizarre. We did talk to each other, attend some of the same events and meetings, have mutual acquaintances…but I just did not have the nerve. It felt out of place. She was closer and more like friends with our acquaintances. They were not shy like I am and just naturally formed a friendship with her because of their outgoing natures. I felt like I had to force it. They would walk up and hug her (OMG i was so jelly lol) or playfully throw an arm around her or pat her on the back or tell jokes with her. They were all buddy buddy with her(some of them were with me too). I so wanted to. I had the inclination. But me being as shy and reserved as I am, it would have been so out of place. When people are naturally social butterflies, they can get away with doing things in social situations that may seem strange if a typically quiet reserved person just ups and does the same. Often people mistake my shyness as me lacking interest, which isn’t the case.
I was put in a psychiatric hospital and released a few months after I met her. I fell into an episode of depression at the end of December for no particular reason, though rooted in a painful social experience as a kid, and at the end of January was still in it. I was very s*icidal. (The initial onset of my depressive condition at thirteen years old was because of social exclusion when girls who were my friends kept not including me then took whatever new friends I got and got them to be friends with them and I had no one – now I still have the disorder even though it’s no longer about that) Unfortunately my closest friend back then blabbed to everyone we knew, everyone, even people we hardly knew, without my permission. It got around to everyone in our social circle and anyone who knew of us. I was absolutely mortified. Everyone, even near strangers came up to express compassion to me. I wanted to die. I thought the stress of it was going to send me right back to that hospital. She was one of the ones to come up to express her compassion. Under different circumstances, I would have been thrilled(I actually was thrilled still but not the same as if I wasn’t just out of a psychiatric hospital and mortified); I was hardly able to contain my joy as she approached me unexpectedly. I had no idea she knew and wasn’t aware what she was coming to say. I just saw the woman I loved making it a point to walk over to me like she was on a mission.
Trigger warning ⚠️: brief mention of r*pe next
She told me about her own struggle with depression and s*icide attempts. She hugged me and told me she understood. She told me she was r*ped years before by a man she knew and liked and trusted and it destroyed her life but she was working on herself constantly to be better. I experienced this incredibly deep connection to her connecting through shared pain and motivation for healing. I loved being in her arms even if only for a few seconds. It was a heartfelt hug. The compassion and concern in her eyes and voice were real. I can feel it now, my heart melting in my chest, the warm fuzzies. The feeling of wanting to collapse into each other’s arms and hold on to each other forever, never letting go. Here was the woman I loved. Standing before me, trusting me enough to reveal her deepest, darkest pain and show a sense of solidarity so that I would have a bit of comfort and love. I had no idea how to react. Back then I was just 21 years old and much more shy than I am now. I stayed mostly quiet and we sat together in comfortable silence. It was one of the most deepest connections I have ever experienced with anyone, not even just because I loved her, but just two women sharing our experiences good and not so good and just trying to survive while trying to help each other do the same. Years later I mentioned to her the incredible impact this encounter with her had on me and still did all those years later. I will never forget it. It’s the only good thing that ever came of my friend blabbing. I only knew her for four months but felt like I have known and loved her forever. I truly couldn’t have loved her more if we knew each other for decades. Time doesn’t matter when it has to do with love. I firmly believe when you know you know. And I knew.
Over a year later, in April, I experienced another episode that was still going a month later, and was hospitalized again. She again expressed compassion. It was me who told her so wasn’t mortifying and since I knew about her struggle also, it was very safe. She told me about her recurring episodes as well, and like me she had mini episodes or waves sometimes in the middle of each major episode. And sometimes a persistent lower grade depression that doesn’t go away for a while. I’m usually happy in the middle of my episodes, but sometimes the waves can be frequent, particularly when I don’t have close friends but can happen sometimes anyway. She was so gentle and warm and so caring. Oh, how I loved her so and just loved so much to be in her presence, to bask in her beauty, to feel her energy all around me. She truly was my everything.
I did not tell my friends about her, ever. I just did not know how to explain it to anyone and knew it’s not “normal.” I knew I was “supposed” to go all ga ga over men, not women. All my friends were LGBTQ people, but they thought I was heterosexual. I just couldn’t explain it. I thought of it as wanting her as a “special friend.” I wondered why even when I had close friends, I longed for a “special friend.” I couldn’t understand the difference but knew there is one.
I felt guilty and like a fraud, like an imposter. My friends all thought I was a heterosexual ally to their community. I could tell I wasn’t into men but did not know how to consciously think it in words because I knew I wasn’t into women either, the exact way my friends who were gay women were, and I had no idea not liking anyone that way was an option for me. Like everyone else, I thought I had to like like someone, and if I don’t like women, I must like men. That would be the logical thing. And society tells me I love and should love men, so I took that label.
Just a random pic of me 🖤 There’s so much text so some pics may help make that more bearable lol and what better subject than me for a post about me! 😁
It was easier to consciously say/think/know I don’t like like women because society tells me I don’t, that I’m not supposed to. It’s programed into my head since birth that I will love men, that I do love men, that I should love men, not other women. It’s explicitly said, and it’s said in all the mundane nuances and occasions and encounters of each day, in every “Do you have a boyfriend?” “What do you look for in a man?” “Your future husband…” “We have to get Kim a boyfriend” “All women love a man who…” “What was your last boyfriend like?” “Just wait til you meet that special guy and fall in love….” “He’s cute, you should ask him out/accept his invitation…” “There’s no way you can know you’re not pregnant, there’s always that small chance…” “What kind of birth control do you use?”…. and on and on and on and on…
The gay women I knew would go into detail about their sexual and romantic experiences and desires. Some of it resonated with me, the emotional, sensual, aesthetic aspects, but I could tell for them it was very different in some way. I wondered if I could be gay but felt not gay enough to actually be. If I would contrast my inclination for women to my complete lack of it for men, I could totally feel gay, but if I compare my inclination for other women to the inclination gay women have for them, it’s not fully the same. Some aspects are but not completely. So this was a very confusing situation to be in. Like wtf am I? I had no idea I was (am) lacking sexual and full-blown romantic attraction but still experiencing other attractions, like emotional and sensual. And no clue there’s a label for what I am and that there are more like me and we have always existed.
My friend would joke around and point out another woman and say hey Kim would you do her? And my other friend would say I don’t think so because Kim is straight!!! And I would just laugh while secretly thinking “Am I though???” Just hearing her say that felt very unnatural to me, not even in a negative way, just felt like no, that’s not me. I would look at the heterosexual women in our group and think no I’m not what they are, but then I would look at the gay women and think but I’m not exactly what they are either, even though I felt more at home with them in that sense.
I knew my love for this woman wasn’t romantic but just as deep, unconditional, passionate. There were no words to explain. But as I said, it wasn’t confusing. It felt like the most normal thing in the world to me. Love is love. Does the nature of it really matter or a label for it? It is what it is.
I also had inclination for calling her and thinking of her as Baby, sweetheart, honey, love, darling, babe…as terms of endearment or affection, something I only rarely experience and when I do only for women. I did call her that occasionally while commenting on her pictures and stuff. So did others. I can in platonic ways for women but don’t usually. And not everyone likes pet names so I wouldn’t most likely now even if I wanted to.
Just seeing her sent some joy and ecstasy through me, like electricity. I became full of excessive energy and very talkative with my friends, laughing hysterically at everything everyone said. My smile hurt my face. It was like getting a “fix” for the day. I was bouncing off the walls all day and night. I was all giddy, my heart racing. I felt like running through the city frolicking about, laughing and singing. I felt the uni-verse gave me the most incredible gift there is to give, letting me catch an unexpected glimpse of her. This was long before sending her the messages.
I lost sleep over her so many nights, even before the rejection because I couldn’t get her off my mind. It was a good thing. I stayed up imagining us becoming close, imagining all the great things we would do together, thinking about how beautiful she was. I used to stay up til 4:30am, dancing around my room just thinking how someone so amazing exists. My dad used to come into my room complaining about me being up singing, dancing around at that hour. 😆 He would hear me and come bursting through my door yelling “Kim!! What the hell are you still doing up at this hour?!”I was bouncing off the walls. 😭 The energy she stirred in me wouldn’t let me rest. I seriously needed no sleep. It kept me going all day and night. I was never tired.(This was after I discovered her later online and saw just how perfect she was – I was over the moon!!)
This may sound like infatuation, but I don’t experience that as someone who is aromantic. It was pure happiness at the prospect of having her as my person and just liking her so much. I can experience this in a purely platonic way. I can experience it for women I like in a sisterly kind of way. I looovvvee people, and they make me so happy.
Eventually, we did not cross paths in person anymore. There was no defining moment when I realized I wouldn’t see her again, so it wasn’t as gutwrenching as it would have been. Circumstances just changed. But I carried my love for her for years. It never ended. I held onto the hope that we would see each other again. The hope wasn’t always active. I wasn’t constantly thinking about it. I knew she was out there somewhere, and somewhat close. This was enough for me. My love for her would take the back burner once in a while, then reappear strong. Sometimes I would find a new woman to be all ga ga over or go back to ones I knew and loved before her, hoping to cross paths with them again, then eventually I would find my way back to her. I have always wanted a woman by my side doing life with me, to love and to hold and to cherish. My love for a woman I like this way can fade a bit when I don’t see them and sometimes be rekindled for no reason, if I see them again, or something that reminds meof them.Not seeing this woman for a while, my love kind of mellowed out, but I carried it with me, hoping to run into her again. Once in a while it would become more active again.I would still daydream about her, sometimes fall asleep thinking of her even years later. There would be “flares” of thinking of her and longing for her then they would fade a bit.
My love stayed calm and hopeful off and on until one day I happened to accidentally come across her on Twitter. I had an online friend who had a Twitter account and I was looking at his and saw he re-tweeted something of hers. Imagine my surprise! To see her beautiful face again years later. My heart nearly leapt out of my chest! I did not have a Twitter account but could see hers. I loved everything she posted. She was very politically Liberal, she called out racism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny. She did this even way before it was the cool mainstream thing to do. She shared all her opinions. This inspired me to look her up on Facebook and Google. It wasn’t in a creepy way. I looked her up on Facebook because we did kind of know each other to a point. If we did not ever know each other, I wouldn’t have. She was popular online and had years worth of writings and stuff, and I found so much of it. Her Facebook account was public, and she had many strangers as friends so I felt it wasn’t too creepy to request her as an online friend. She accepted.
I saw that she had a YouTube channel, blog, and Instagram account where she shared every aspect of her life and every thought that crossed her mind, even things most would not make public, like cheating on her husband with a married man, ruining both of their marriages, having an abortion without telling her husband (not saying she should have had to, but this is something most people wouldn’t broadcast to the world lol), she admitted to once dating and then moving in with a man just to use him for his money and place to live and things, when she wasn’t really in love with or interested in him for him, getting into arguments with people, the falling out she had with various friends and family members…
She was extremely passionate about openly supporting minority groups of any kind. She visited other cultures and learned their customs and languages. She denounced public figures/celebrities/popular people who expressed prejudicial attitudes against minority groups. She volunteered and donated money to organizations supporting minority groups. She got a lot of criticism, even threats, but this did not stop her. She traveled and gave public speeches on LGBTQIA+ and racial minority issues. She wrote blog posts and newspaper articles on the issues. She was/is a Jewish atheist and shared her experience with that, what it’s like growing up in a Jewish family and lacking faith in religion/gods, being the target of anti-Semitism…She did all this while battling debilitating mental illness and devastating headaches. I was in awe.
All this deepened my awe of her. Every terrible thing she did and shared and every great thing about her all clashed into a beautiful disarray of seasons and colors and everything, a beautiful disaster.
I’m getting this electrified feeling through my whole body just thinking back to that feeling of when I discovered her online and came to know her much better. It was the most amazing feeling. It was like I found my soulmate, my other half, my one for life. It was like falling madly in love and ecstatic and stars exploding all around me, but also a safe, secure feeling of home. And for some reason I just took for granted that she would likely feel the same. I just assumed we would be friends. I’m getting giddy as I write, like my whole body feels lighter and like it wants to move, like I want to put on some music and dance. Not because I want her still but just remembering that feeling itself. Oh, my! I crave it again. I can get that feeling for different women, but it’s most strongest if I see some possibility we can be in each other’s lives in some way, which is usually not the case. I can even get it for women I only know online. I can totally love a man as my friend, brother, platonic soulmate. But it’s different, never like this.
She shared about how her apartment had roaches everywhere because she never cleaned. She said in a YouTube video, I never clean my apartment and it has roaches everywhere…because it’s so disgusting. (I’m a slob too 😆 So I thought nothing of it – I don’t have roaches though lol I’m telling you we were made for each other, don’t know where her head was rejecting me…no two people could ever be better for one another 😂 Match made in Heaven, which unfortunately she couldn’t see 😆)
I wondered if her husband was out of his mind letting her go. I would have kept her and taken her back again and again.
We both held the rare philosophy that romantic love is not better than platonic love and friendship and that platonic love is equally fulfilling and important. And we both did not want to get married (she said once was enough for her, but she still wanted love).
She used to do “What’s in my purse” videos (This was a thing years ago{anyone remember that? lol}, lots of girls would do blog posts/videos where they would list/show pics of everything in their handbag lol It was something other girls loved to see – I used to love those post the women would do when I read their blogs/watched their videos, I used to wait for them when they would mention in a post that their next post would be what’s in my purse lol) where she would open up her bag and show each thing in it. She loved Hello Kitty (like me!) and kept her birth control in a hello kitty holder lol I liked that we both loved hello kitty, lots of people thought it’s for kids. It seemed sweet & innocent. I wrote to her that I love hello kitty too but don’t think she was as impressed as I was that she loved her lol
We also both have a currently incurable chronic headache pain disorder. Not the same disorder but we both have episodic debilitating headache attacks. She would share her struggle, and I could totally relate to the physical pain as well as the emotional pain of not being able to have certain food that can trigger an attack, food that we want to have. She couldn’t have chocolate (I can, but for me, chocolate chips are a bit difficult, n mint chip ice cream is my favorite, so that sucks), and she would cry about it sometimes because she loved it. I would find it heartbreaking and told myself when we become friends, I will never eat chocolate again so she wouldn’t be sad, even though I love chocolate.
We both had depression and both diagnosed with a psychotic disorder and had similar experiences with it. Hers was much worse. It was more frequent and affected her life more than mine.
I thought there couldn’t be a more amazing person. It wasn’t that I loved her “anyway.” That could have been true also.
But I loved her even more, because.
I don’t particularly have a thing for users, cheaters, homewreckers, liars, slobs, troublemakers, … it’s just because it was HER.
I also found out we loved the same kinds of stuff, books, music, cafes, movie theatres, shopping…
This is when I fell so madly in love. If I thought it was love before, this was on a whole other plane.
I felt we were soulmates. lol I wanted a relationship with her that is more interconnected or close than close best friends usually are. But I would have been absolutely thrilled to have her in any context, even if she was a casual acquaintance or work friend. Most of my pain was not having any contact with her. I just wanted her in my world in some way. I would not have even cared if she had a girlfriend or boyfriend or romantic partner but still loved me. I was so super jealous of her friends and acquaintances because I did not have her in any way except a few social media comments/likes here and there. It was so tantalizing.
I did not realize back then that if she was in a monogamous romantic relationship, the person probably wouldn’t want her in this kind of relationship with me, and it would be emotional cheating unless her romantic partner agreed to it. Since it wouldn’t be sexual or romantic I thought it could work out with someone who is already in a monogamous romantic relationship. I knew most wouldn’t love me as much as they love their romantic partner and wouldn’t want to be that emotionally close to me, but thought it’s still a possibility. I did not realize til somewhat recently that it wouldn’t be as easy or ethical as I thought. It would likely only work out with polyam people who are in a relationship. No monogamous people want their romantic partner that emotionally/sensually close to someone else. It wasn’t til a few conversations with people about how romantic attraction and relationships work and me thinking more deeply about it that I realized. I wouldn’t ever have a relationship like this with a monogamous person in a romantic relationship unless their romantic partner understood and fully consented. I prefer if the person isn’t already taken though and that it’s just us, but wouldn’t care if they get sexual desires/needs fulfilled somewhere else and come home to me. I prefer if their love/emotional investment in this way is just for me though.
Best friends are usually not or not always going to be each other’s main person in life. They usually have or eventually have a romantic partner/family who comes first or is inherently their main person/people no matter how much they love or how close they are to their best friend. Society is just set up that way, and that’s ok. I don’t mind having a very best friend who puts her romantic partner/family first. But I have always longed for a relationship with a woman that is not romantic but as close as one, where we are each other’s main person and always will be. I have never been into dating or marriage though or “building a life” with someone or making big life decisions as a couple. It’s like a combination of aromanticism and homoromanticism. I have said my aromanticism is laced with homoromanticism. Many aros don’t want a close person like this and are even grossed out or feel smothered by the thought. That’s what it’s like for me when I think about it with a man. Throughout life, I have always had this inclination for women. And this is one woman I have experienced this for, one of the ones I felt this the strongest for, and the only one I made a move like this to show it as best as I knew how then.
We had all the same interests and opinions. We had the same style/fashion sense, except she dressed in skirts and dresses a lot, she loved makeup and jewelry and clothes like me. She was super girly, long wavy brown hair, dressed in heels a lot, big earrings, simply gorgeous. I loved her in her glasses and was extremely annoyed when someone suggested to her that she get contact lenses. Like, no!! She wasn’t interested in contacts anyway. She couldn’t see well without glasses and always needed them. She said she felt they blocked much of the beauty of her eyes. But I saw them well. She loved walking around the city taking pictures, like me. She was very intellectual and taught college/high school students before, English and writing and stuff. She has an advanced degree in English. We were both deep and on the same emotional/intellectual level, and loved poetry and old literature.
I wanted nothing but her. I wanted her to be mine and to take care of her forever. I am the initiator{but never have the nerve to make the very first move lol}, the protector, the giver more than taking, the comforter, the nurturer…I prefer to hold than to be held, to touch than be touched, to love than to be loved, though I like receiving it too. So I dreamed of taking care of and loving and protecting her. I felt like if she was mine, I would have a literal perfect life and we would both be happy together forever. I felt like any problem I ever had would disappear if she was mine. So I sent her a long message, two actually, (don’t know how I got up the nerve but I did and wholeheartedly regretted it lol It was and still is uncharacteristic of me to be so bold) gushing about how we could be amazing friends and live close enough to hang out and do everything together since we like all the same stuff and she unfriended my account, after not responding for a few days. lol (definitely was NOT laughing back then)
I actually sent her long messages before about liking all the work she did helping people and told her some stuff about my self but it wasn’t the same way. She did respond and thanked me. In this case, I wasn’t expecting a response because it was just me wanting to express gratitude.
I saw people who were strangers to her but lived close enough, commenting on her posts asking to get coffee or ice cream with her and her agreeing. She was very social and a bit popular because of all her activism work and volunteering and she had a large social media and blog following, mostly by people in our city. So my message to her was not completely out of the ordinary for her who did get lots of requests to meet up and hang out and she was always getting compliments on her physical beauty and personality. I had lots of competition; everyone loved her. LoL She also got a lot of negative comments by a-holes who did not like her political views or just wanted to troll. This would infuriate me and I wanted to tell them all off. LoL I was very protective and defensive of her. I could not stand her getting negative comments. To me, she was perfection.
Back then, her rejection was the worst thing ever, and triggered a two month long major depressive episode thankfully not a s*icidal one but still debilitating – I was able to keep the s*icidal thoughts under control and I had close friends, which helped, even though they did not know what was going on, exactly, but I had difficulty getting out of bed each morning and getting to work, my body was so heavy and most of my joy in life was gone, s*icidal thoughts tried to emerge but I was able to keep them away, I saw no hope for any future for me, no food had flavor, I couldn’t sleep, no motivation to do anything – all I thought about was her and why she did not want me, was I not good enough…
My whole self felt so broken; it felt like I wasn’t whole, like I would never be because of this experience. I felt the rejection of someone and something I desperately wanted, but also, I felt a deep deep sense of loss. She was never mine to lose, but still I felt deep, profound loss. There was always that possibility. Beautiful potential. At least in my mind. But it was snatched away because of my decision to reach out and make myself and my love known. Oh. How I regretted it so. For years. How I regretted it. I regretted everything I said. Every word of it.
I remember this was one of the things that made it especially difficult to move on. I felt that I was irreparably broken, that I was now tarnished and would never be able to love anyone ever again. It felt like something significant, something inherent to me being me, was cut off permanently. I felt that I became a lesser version of me, a hollow version, a shadow or shell of what I was before I reached out to her. She was so much an essential part of me (with my perspective) or my love for her was, that it seemed impossible to have a full life loving her when she did not love me at all. It was like what good is life when the most important thing to me isn’t in mine. It’s a bit deeper than I know how to put into words. I feel it’s coming off more superficial than it was. It wasn’t simply a matter of I can’t have her what good is life, that too. It was more that my love for her felt so fundamental to my core or identity that I felt somehow altered at a cellular level, almost like I wasn’t the full me anymore that I was. Like an identity crisis. It felt like this part of me , loving someone to this extent, this depth, this magnitude, who does not love me even just a little bit, is making me less the girl I was. It physically sickened me to the point my headache disorder flared up unbearably for weeks and it felt like life was crumbling on top of me. The headaches were devastating, even more devastating than the emotional pain, in a way. I find physical pain of this magnitude to be even more difficult to cope with than emotional pain. It felt like my face being burned alive on one side. I have been depressed before over losses, exclusion, but this was different.
I’m thankful now for the opportunity to be able to put into words as best as I can, what I did not have the nerve or ability to back then. I thought I would take this to my grave. Writing it is healing.
I have come to really like b&w photos of me. 🖤 I never used to (excuse the cracked lips, it’s cold here in Philadelphia 😆)
I truly thought I would never love this way again, had no idea it would heal and I would go on to love other women like this, and the stress of it triggered severe, debilitating headaches for days and days – my body was sickened, one of the worst stresses it has ever been under. I loved the joy this love brought me and wanted to be able to feel it again for someone who would love me back – thankfully I have felt this love again but unfortunately haven’t been loved back yet) but the grief lasted years(I don’t get depressed whenever someone rejects me. It just happened to happen then.)
People noticed and asked what’s wrong and I said I was rejected and they thought by a man so I let them think it and they would say things like “You’re better off without that guy” and “That guy is just a jerk; you don’t need him.” “You’re too beautiful for him anyway; he doesn’t know what he’s missing.” “Guy must be out of his mind!” One day I wrote “I love someone who doesn’t love me back” with a bunch of broken heart emojis and people were writing “Well does he know how you feel about him…?” I’m bellylaughing now. The only good thing about that was having people thinking I was a normal girl who liked men, romantically.
There were men telling me things like “Wow, I can’t believe this guy; I could never reject a woman like you…” and it gave me a low self esteem kind of feeling, like I’m only good enough for men.
To get to see so much of her life (she was very open about every single aspect of her life, social, emotional, dating, romantic, sexual, marriage, interests, politics, religion, family, health/medical…She was raw, open, honest…and this is one of the things I loved most about her, how she shared herself with the world. I find being “an open book,” a very attractive quality in people) displayed on my screen and not getting to be a part of it in any way, was pain like I can’t explain.
She was my everything and more, and to not be good enough for her was a pain that is indescribable. Everyday, the pain ripped through me emotionally and physically. It felt like my life was over. I couldn’t see a future without her now that I found her. I truly felt that way for a while, that without her, life had nothing to offer me. But at the same second, the joy it brought me just to cross paths with her and know someone that beautiful exists, was out of this world. I was so amazed by the sharp contrast of joy and pain she brought me. They existed alongside one another, never touching or tainting each other. They never mixed or outweighed each other. They both had a place within. If it wasn’t for the overwhelming gratitude for just having crossed paths with her in this life and the knowledge of how wonderful she was, the pain would have been so much more difficult to bear. But the pain did not touch the gratitude, making it so I had that to lean on to carry me through it.
Here is part of a poem I wrote about her:
I want to tell you That you are the girl Who keeps me up at night The one who beckons me Unknowingly To the edge Of some madness Too vast, too dark to Explore The one who lifts me To the greatest pinnacle Of joy and love and hope The one who drops me As I plummet To the lowest depths Of my despair
That top line, I stole out of a popular song. 😆 That is the only line in the poem I did not make up myself. Stolen but so true.
While the pain and joy were both equal, in fact, the joy was even deeper, I had to eventually give into the pain and let her go around three years later – the depression lifted after two months but the heartbreak continued – I stayed in love with her for the next couple years, after I stopped looking at all her content. I stalked it for a few years, then stopped, still actively loved her for a couple more years even after cutting off all contact with her content, til it eventually faded. It mellowed and gradually faded til it flickered out completely and thoughts of her were no longer painful or joyful. For a while I was still embarrassed and hoped she deleted the messages. LoL 😆 Kind of still low-key embarrassed.
One activity that helped me heal the painful emotions involved was writing down on paper, using pencil to give them less power, as many painful emotions (grief, loss, pain, mortified, sad, devastated, physical pain, depression, sickness, rejected, broken…) as I could that were associated with my experience. I let myself feel the painful emotions, let them surface and flow through me. Then I erased the words and imagined the painful emotions leaving me, leaving my body, healing…Then I wrote in marker, in the spaces where the unpleasant emotions were in pencil, positive words and emotions, (love, healing, healed, peace, letting go, strength, courage, resolve, resilient, inner strength, self love, calm, serenity, moving forward…) Letting them flow. This was a very powerful activity and helped me immensely.
Another thing that helped me get over her is leaning into the selfless aspect of my love for her. There was a part of that love that wasn’t for me. A part that wanted nothing but for her to be happy, healthy, fulfilled. A part that did not yearn or attach or expect. I seized that small but powerful aspect and leaned into it, nourished it, clung to it, until it grew, strengthened, deepened, magnified, and became enough. That aspect of my love reminded me what an honor it was to get to feel this love for someone, it let me know my love wasn’t in vain, that it still mattered, still counted for something. It showed me the beauty in loving at a distance, of carrying a love so strong for someone I will never lay eyes on, someone I will never embrace, someone I will never have. It showed me a deep deep selflessness and let me live it each day. It reminded me that it’s a reflection of me, but it’s not about me. I was able to let go of so much of the selfish aspect of love, the part that makes us covet. The part that expects and demands and is often conditional. I leaned so deeply into the selfless aspect until I submerged, til it eased some of the ache, the burn of rejection, until it made that selfish agonized part softer and softer, until it made me strong enough to endure without crumbling, and then that state gave way to the indifference, the indifference that eventually ensued after all the heartache and ruin, the indifference that set me freeand gave me my life back.
In fact, the kind of person she was is one of the things that inspired me to cope and eventually heal. She was the kind of person who saw beauty in pain and brokenness, art in imperfection, she saw love & life & light in dark places, and a chance for healing in deep wounds. I harnessed that energy. And I put it to use in myself. I saw beauty in my pain and the brokenness of unrequited love. I saw my life of loving her as a beautiful novel, like the novels she read full of dark and despair, full of heartache, but also so much love and beauty. I saw love & life & light in my darkness, and I saw my wound, my deep deep gaping wound, as an opportunity to nourish and heal a part of myself that was so shattered. And I leaned into this. The person I allowed to break me because I depended so much on and expected so much of her is the very person I leaned on to inspire me to heal that brokenness. Loving her so deeply for so long, she became my way of life, and that way helped me move forward out of the devastation that came upon my world. She was my darkness & my light, my joy and my pain, my despair & my hope, she’s the one I clung to so desperately for so long and the one who taught me how to let go. The one who brought me to ruin and my savior who pulled me out of that ruin. There was a beautiful irony in all of this that wasn’t lost on me. It’s a true story that she would have read and found so beautiful.
To keep dwelling on her and stalking her (lol) was keeping me in agony and doing me no good. The pain had more of a destructive effect overall than the joy had a positive effect. The pain was about not having her as my own but also the fact of being rejected and not understanding why. I know everyone doesn’t like everyone, especially not in a deep way, but she did not even want me as an online friend anymore. It was hard to cope and understand. I had very good self esteem, always have, and this rejection was a blow to it. The fact that she responded to everyone else, even strangers, and loved everyone, but rejected me, made it so much more difficult to cope. One of my messages to her was about my s*icidal depression, something she talked about very frequently, about herself. She was very very open about her struggle.
I told her about my own struggle, which is very similar to hers. I’m open about it in general but told her more than I ever told anyone because I felt this deep connection to her in our similar struggle. I told her that I too sometimes come close to ending myself. It cut me so deeply because shortly after I sent her the message about my depression and sometimes s*icidal thoughts(I sent this a while after the love letter), she posted, “To anyone considering s*icide, please remember this world needs you.” And she posted the s*icide hotline. To see her care about everyone else and not me was devastating. I felt like it was a slap in the face. Not that I was entitled to her love or a response but that did not make my pain any less to see my own pain ignored and me rejected but that she cared about other s*icidal people. It’s hard to explain without sounding entitled. I in no way felt that she owed me anything(I even remember feeling guilty for my pain and sense of rejection, telling myself she doesn’t owe me a thing, that I’m the one who found and came at her), but it did not make me want it any less. I wasn’t angry or bitter but devastated.
I felt that I wasn’t good enough for anyone after the rejection and took a while to recover. I couldn’t cope knowing “the most amazing person who ever walked the face of the Earth” did not love me. lol It was a matter of “If I can’t have her, I don’t want anyone.” It was like we were made for each other and if I can’t have her what’s the sense of having anyone? It was one of the deepest, most intimate (non sexual, of course) loves I have ever known and I was sure I would never feel it again for anyone(though I have felt it before and after, for different women, but this was one of the strongest, it’s not quite romantic but has like the same emotional core or investment, hard to explain in words, not better or more fulfilling than regular platonic, just a bit different and more layers/depth.) I thought I would never get over it. I couldn’t understand why she did not feel the same.
Everything was so perfect and compatible, even our location was close(this is one of the main reasons for my pain, it was so tantalizing to have her so close in location but not have her, it would have been perfect). She loved women, so not like she was creeped out that another woman was in love with her. Also, she, like me, was very social and added strangers to her account. And she was promiscuous, hooked up with lots of women and men she hardly knew and did not know at all, and was very open about it, even going into detail about her usual hookups, how she cheated on her now ex husband with a married man and ruined both of their marriages, and drunken hookups and abortions and stuff, so I don’t think she cared that someone she hardly knew messaged her, probably all my sap creeped her out(it was a long love letter of nothing but praise and how I understand her completely and how we would be so good together forever – I’m laughing now lol I probably sounded desperate and clingy). Her rejection did not weaken my love for her at all. It made no sense to me how, why we both existed in this same life together, so so alike, so compatible, my love for her so strong, yet we couldn’t be together or have any interaction at all with each other. I felt like the uni-verse made us for each other. And I couldn’t make sense of the fact that she did not like me even just a little bit. It made no sense.On top of my amazing self esteem thinking I was the shiz just in general and that anyone could like me (oh how this has changed), the fact we were both so similar, and that she basically loved everyone, I thought she was bound to like me. So I was totally confused and shocked to be rejected even as an online acquaintance.The devastation was debilitating.
I think she was probably put off by the fact she hardly knew me and I came on very strongly out of nowhere. Hooking up with strangers can be just a casual, physical thing. Mine was deep and full of emotion. She was the same way though, very sappy and loving. One of the things that drew me to her was her compassion for others. She would often cry about things she saw in the news and donate money to help people. I paid attention to her and looked at all her social media content, watched her youtube channel religiously, so felt I knew her better than she knew me. I was already very intrigued by her and wanted to get to know her, but finding so much more about her, and that she was just as amazing as I thought she was, made me over the moon for her. And the fact we were so similar, it was like finding my other half.
Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t that I came off as creepy and clingy but just knowing someone loved her like I did, scared her. She wasn’t emotionally healthy. It can be hard to accept love if we aren’t in a healthy place. Even a healthy person can be afraid when faced with the possibility of being truly loved by someone, platonically or romantically, especially if they have been deeply hurt before by someone they trusted. My message wasn’t psycho single wh!te female/roommate style. lol In case you don’t know roommate and single wh!te female are movies about a young woman who is platonically obsessed with another young woman in a way that isn’t normal, not even normal clingy but straight up literal psycho obsession. My messages were deeply passionate, full of intense emotion, maybe a bit too strong for trying to begin a relationship with someone we hardly know or communicate with, but not scary or literally obsessed. Also I was 20 something years old and that probably showed. I think youth can add to display of intensity or lack of social skills/boundaries. I would be more mature about it as a middle aged adult now.
We were similar in even ways that can’t be explained, like quirks that you think only you experience, or just little things that you think make you you and no one else can be like that. I was amazed! I never send friend requests, but I did send her one, and she accepted. She was more active on Insta, which I did not have, and her blog, and YouTube channel. She never liked or commented on any of my posts or pictures on social media. But she did occasionally respond to my comments to her or like them. We did not really interact much as friends though.
Just out of nowhere, for some reason, I chose to be bold and tell her that I loved her. Have no idea what possessed me. LoL I remember my heart was pounding in anticipation as I was sending it and expecting a response that she would love to meet me again. I remember waking up one morning and on the spur of the moment thinking “I think I’ll tell her I love her today.” I jumped out of bed, literally. LoL I sprung up and jumped with joy at the thought of connecting with her. I worked all day on the messages and poured my heart and soul into them. It took me days to get everything written out and edited and then finally I sent two messages and waited. For days I waited and she wouldn’t respond. I would see her keep posting on social media and not responding to me.
Actually what I remember is, she was very active on social media/blog/YouTube… posted every single day, all throughout the day. And after I sent her the messages, she stopped posting everywhere fora few days. Then she came back and began posting everyday again but not responding to me.
Then finally she unfriended my account. Imagine the initial sting of clicking on her account and seeing “Add friend” and then the deep deep pain of all that entailed and implied, of everything it meant. I hoped so much she would change her mind and held out hope til I finally had to accept she wasn’t going to respond and did not love me. The first thing I thought is that I came on too strongly.
I only did because she was that kind of person, herself. If she was more reserved, even if I liked her, I wouldn’t have sent messages like that. She talked about how she scared men away who she was dating or into because of how much emotion and love she had. She was kind of clingy. And she talked about how she overshared about everything, way too often, with everyone, even strangers. And I saw that in her YouTube videos, and she would stop and say “Wait, was that too much information?” LoL It would make me laugh. She said the more we share about ourselves, even ugly and awkward things, the more people have the opportunity to know us and therefore love us. And also that it empowers others to be themselves and feel less alone. I wholeheartedly agreed. I wrote to her one day that there is no such thing as too much information or too much love.
Maybe she just couldn’t handle being the recipient, herself.
Also, not sure if the age difference was a factor in her rejection? I was 20 something years old and she was nearly 50 years old (I remember she was struggling feeling she was too old to be attractive any longer. She made a youtube video ugly crying [except she wasn’t at all ugly lol She was beautiful, though she couldn’t see it] about her birthday and that she was afraid of going into a depressive episode over it(she suffered an episode about her 40th one, I saw in a blog post and she had multiple hospitalizations for depression, like me, but she had way more), and I wrote that she’s the most beautiful woman imaginable lol I guess it was kind of cringe worthy of me since we weren’t close but I would love if a stranger wrote that to me, only thing is I wasn’t simply complimenting her here, but trying to initiate a relationship). It wasn’t like I asked her out on a date or something. Basically asked to be her everything though. I kind of threw myself at her. lol
It absolutely k!lled me wondering why others were good enough for her but not me. She had many lovers and friends and acquaintances and even strangers who she expressed love for through the years. She was a hopeless romantic and was sad to be single but she couldn’t get a relationship to work. I would have been overjoyed even to be a casual acquaintance and have even a fraction of her love.
Suddenly, a man showed up in all her pictures and blog posts and videos, constantly talking about how amazing he is. She said he wasn’t a boyfriend, but a very close platonic friend, and they were always holding hands and kissing on the cheek, and going to weddings and restaurants together. He was always calling her his girl and Babe and posting pics of her on his own account(I stalked his account, bitter at him for stealing my woman and the nerve to call her Babe 😆 I thought of her as my babe and my sweetheart, my girl) and she called him “my guy” and “my man” and posted pics of him on her account. It destroyed me because it was like the relationship I wanted with her. But I focused more on my love for her than the pain after a while and was able to be happy she found a true friend even though I still experienced such deep pain for myself. It was hard not to be jealous of him. Like come out of nowhere and get the girl of my dreams. Like gtfoh lol
I remember them celebrating her birthday together and I was torn. In one way I was happy someone was being good to her and she was happy, but another part of me was jealous that I wasn’t included and angry at him for being to her what I wanted to be. It was so difficult. The pictures and posts they would share while out celebrating all night would bring me pain, yet also joy. And I was happy she was happy because I knew her birthdays were difficult forher because she couldn’t stand getting older. So it was good to see him keeping her uplifted and happy. She also lost her job after a while and he was there to bring her comfort. I was happy but sorry it wasn’t me. I was concerned she would go into an episode of depression and hoped he was keeping her safe. I longed to reach out to her with some words of comfort but knew I couldn’t because she did not want me. I hoped so much he knew how to take care of her like I would.
I remember her posting a picture one day, New Year’s Eve, of her and him cuddled on her sofa together, her head resting on him. Her caption was something like “My main man{and his name}, I couldn’t have done this year without you.” I had mixed emotions about it. Part of me was thankful she had someone helping her through her difficult year. But so much of me was in anguish that I wasn’t in his position. It was an inner struggle of true love being happy for her but a selfish pain that it wasn’t me making her happy and giving her love and receiving her love. I experienced both gratitude and resentment for him. I would so so much prefer her to have him than no one and even have him over me if it’s what she genuinely wanted. But I wanted her to want me.
I was so pissed when he changed his Facebook and Instagram default photos to a picture of just her.
“I see you driving round town with the girl I love, and I’m like f*ck you.” 😆😆
I was in so much pain every day and night. Emotionally and physically. The rejection triggered the two months long depressive episode to begin with. But through the years every once in a while I would go into another episode, usually lasting a month, about it. It would lift, and I would go back to the regular pain about it. I lived a regular happy life in general, just carried this pain with me that would flare once in a while. Sometimes I would go a while without looking at her content or thinking of her much, then would look at her social media account, and a depressive episode/wave would be triggered. Or sometimes I would be in a low mood that I call a gateway state to depression; it’s not depression itself or even necessarily unhappiness but a tender state where I can feel if I’m not careful, I can become depressed. If I would think too much about her or check her social media accounts/blogs in this state, a depressive episode or wave could hit. This happened off and on til I was no longer interested in her.
My head throbbed relentlessly and the heartache was unbearable. I clung to anything I could for any bit of consolation. The main thing I found solace in was reading. I threw myself into books and read more than I ever read before. Mystery thrillers that kept me guessing what would happen next, intellectual readings to keep my mind active and thinking, personal development books that gave me tips for coping… anything to take my mind off her and my depression. It was a mixture of grief and depression and it was Hell on Earth. Everything I read I would wish I could tell her about. She loved to read too. I wanted to read books together and have hours long discussions. Every love song, I thought of her.
She had very low self esteem, body image issues, and bad luck with relationships. She dated people of any genders but especially men and had no luck. This is something that was getting to her. She said she felt lonely and left out everywhere, and I wanted to run to her rescue. I felt that I could make up for all those failed relationships of hers with all the love I had to give. I’m not this arrogant anymore. It knocked me down a few pegs and I never quitegot back up.
The rejection of someone I loved with every fiber of my being and was ready and willing to love wholeheartedly, just cuts so deeply and hits hard. She was a very emotionally unhealthy and complicated person when I think back, full of insecurities, and I longed to put them all to rest. I wanted to make her better so she wouldn’t have to suffer anymore, because I loved her and she was a good person. She was a trainwreck, and it probably wouldn’t have been all rainbows and butterflies to get to love her, though I still would. Love isn’t supposed to be all perfection and happiness. (It shouldn’t be toxic either though, and thinking back, I have an inkling it could have been, with her, but I thought I would be able to calm her and make it so we have an easy love and life together) I loved her unconditionally. She admitted that she made all her relationships, even platonic friendships, complicated. I thought that made her even more beautiful, somehow. Today, I would not think that, no matter how much I love someone. I thought of her as a beautiful work of art. I always thought broken things are so beautiful, and she was so broken. There are things I wouldn’t have accepted in other people or would have been put off by but accepted in her. Sometimes she could be a bit judgemental of other women because of her jealousy as a result of her low self esteem. I did not like this even then, and there were a couple other things I remember rubbing me the wrong way. But because I loved her, I did not criticize.
I was nowhere near as unhealthy in the head as she was. I just had depression. I joke that I’m a s*icidal wreck sometimes, but it’s just depression that comes and goes. I don’t have conniptions in public, or meltdowns ever. Even when I’m depressed, I’m very composed on the outside. I’m also not full of general insecurities, just in general when I’m not depressed. She was. She was often a wreck by what I read and saw in her YouTube videos. She became addicted to prescription drugs and was in the process of recovery. I thought my depression was bad and that I had issues, but it’s like a walk in a park next to her issues. I thought I would be able to help calm her and love her into healing and wholeness. She had some messed up and thoughtless friends who did not have her best interests and safety in mind(she did not say this, and I don’t think she realized, but I could tell by the things she mentioned about them), and I wanted to show up and take care of her.
They would go out together late at night and let her go home alone, even while intoxicated. If she decided she wanted to go home early and they still wanted to stay out, they would stay and she would go. If I was out with a woman who wanted to leave early, I would go with her no matter how much I wanted to stay. Someone else’s safety, sense of safety, and emotional support is more important than my fun. They would let her leave, drunk, with men she just met. They would watch movies together, knowing there are trigger scenes for her in them. She would just casually mention these things, to get to a different point. I don’t think she realized she can do much better than this and is worthy of more than this. I wanted so desperately to show her. I wanted to show her what love really is.
She would have emotional breakdowns, randomly, or sometimes triggered by something, in public, out with friends. She had panic attacks and ptsd and manic episodes. Sometimes she would run out of movie theaters or restaurants and have a breakdown somewhere. She would sob, collapse, sometimes hit things, like the walls in restroom stalls. Sometimes she would experience homicidal tendencies when she would have fits of rage. Her friends would have to try to calm her. I would see her mood swings in YouTube videos. She couldn’t always stay composed while trying to talk. She would often break down, sobbing or just burst out crying. All this made me ache for her and want to hug and love all her pain away. Not that that’s possible and I never believed I could cure her, but I knew I could be by her side and love her through it all. As I write this now, I feel that ache I used to feel for her, not the ache of wanting her love and wanting to love her, but the ache I experienced for her in her deep pain. The compassion, the sorrow, I no longer wish I was there hugging and loving her(though I hope someone is, maybe he still is), but as I think back, I have deep deep compassion and concern, and hope so much she is in a much better place, emotionally. I find it heartbreaking just to think back to some of her videos and the pain she shared. I don’t have those active protective urges any longer but still wish the best for her.
I still do think of her as one of my soulmates in this life; that will never change. We are aligned emotionally, morally, intellectually, sense of humor….I no longer think of her as my soulmate or other half, but still part of my soul family.
Her smile would make me smile so big that it hurt. She was a big animal lover, which made her win my heart even more. She loved animals like me in a way most people don’t. Like me, she cared when a rat or mouse would die.
One day she shared that she found a dead mouse outside and she sat down and cried next to it, then buried it. She posted a picture of the mini memorial/grave she made for it. It was heartwarming, and I longed to hug her. This deepened my conviction that we were soulmates. I rarely to never meet people who care when a rodent or insect dies like I do. She would even feed roaches outside if she saw them and so do I. Lol Giving them bread or pretzels and some water. I have never known someone so compassionate except the Buddhists I used to hang out with Her and me are atheists.
I find it gutwrenching when even an insect dies. One day a caterpillar died and it triggered a s*icidal depressive episode in me for a month, mostly because it was my fault and the guilt triggered it, but it was heartbreaking to see the little baby die. Got ran over by a car. It’s painful to recall and write about this. She was the same way. This adds to my wondering about why she did not love me back. She basically loved everyone but not the one who loved her most and is just like her.
She made me laugh with her videos and posts. When she would cry in youtube videos I longed to hug her and stroke her hair and make it all better. Even after she unfriended my account, seeing pictures/videos of her (I was a creep and still read her blog and looked at her accounts, asking myself why, why, why lol), would just make me beam with love & joy. I was just drawn to her energy, sensitivity, compassion…and felt the loss of being unfriended. I wasn’t ready to give her up as an online friend. I wanted to still see her pictures and hear about her life. I wanted to be uplifted and inspired by the wisdom and beauty she shared, and this all would have been good enough to an extent if I wasn’t rejected. There are other women I only knew/know online and wish I knew in person and never reach out to them, and it’s still so amazing just knowing them in this context. But knowing this woman outright did not love me or like me even knowing all this about me and how much I loved her, made it too painful.
I thought she had the most beautiful hair, face, smile, eyes, just everything. I could not stop looking at her. She took my breath away. I admit her beauty was part of the whole that made me love her. I am very aesthetically attracted to women and for us aces/aros, that can play a part in our interest in someone just like sexual attraction for non asexual people. Her physical beauty mesmerized me. So often, I looked at her and thought, she is the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on.
Not my photo! To get an idea of what she looked like. She looked very very much like this. Isn’t she lovely? 😍 This is a random photo off Google images, like one of those stock photos. I was looking for a random pic to share just to give an idea and was surprised and delighted to quickly find one of a person who fits her exact description and looks very similar. Now I’m falling in love with this one. 😆
She looks so similar I almost felt a fluttering in my chest at the memory. See how she has that professional, intellectual air about her? She appears well read and educated. Someone who can hold a deep and intelligent conversation and just understands life and things. Not to be ableist, classicst, and whatever else. Nothing wrong with not being that way. But I like it when I see it in a woman. She used to wear bracelets and paint her nails like this too.
I often daydreamed of us going out to cafes and strolling the city streets together, arm in arm, fingers laced together, reading together in a park, and always wished I could hug her and rest our heads on each other’s shoulders. I tortured myself about why she did not want me. This was like a decade ago and I am so over it. The thing I found interesting is how even with so much pain and despair, this love I had for her brought me a joy that couldn’t be touched and she brought me incredible joy even after the rejection. It was true love. It was hard to let her go because just seeing a picture of her made me overjoyed. I did not want to give up that joy. I would fall asleep at night looking at her beautiful face and smiling through the immense pain and grief.
I felt we were made to belong to each other. Like we were written in the stars. Sometimes on very rare occasions I have a feeling like there was a glitch somewhere in the uni-verse and we were made for each other but that glitch interfered. I don’t actually believe this, just a metaphor or something for a feeling I have.
Sometimes I wonder if there was some freak string of coincidental glitches in algorithms or something and she did not receive my messages and also accidentally got off my friends list. This can happen. Someone can accidentally get unfriended/unfollowed on social media. It has happened to me before. When I was sending her the e-mails, they wouldn’t go through at first. It kept saying there was an unexpected error, and I had to keep resending. But they did show up in my sent box, eventually. So they seemed to have gone through. It’s more likely she did receive them and unfriended my account. It seems too coincidental to get unfriended so close to after sending e-mails. Sometimes when I think it could have been a mistake and she never received it because of a glitch in e-mail systems, and FB had some glitch, I experience a physiological reaction, a clenching in my gut, a dizzy sickly sensation, a fear sensation in my chest, an almost sweating sensation in the palms of my hands, to think it’s possible she could have loved me and we could have been together forever but it was prevented by a glitch. Though sometimes this thought has thrilled me, thinking there could still be a chance. Maybe I’ll run into her on the streets one day and she’ll send my heart racing and she’ll remember me and approach me first and all the stars will align and we’ll finally be together for the rest of forever. And one day I’ll tell her and we’ll laugh about it. A girl can dream.
But other occasions I was so mortified at the thought of rejection and looking clingy and overly sappy, that I preferred that she just did not see them than rejected me. For the most part now, I’m indifferent. It’s like either way, whatevz. Though it seems a bit unfortunate if she just did not see my messages. What a potentially beautiful thing possibly destroyed before it ever came to be, all because of a couple online glitches.
It was probably just all my sap was a big turn off lol 😆
I would have been so happy to know her or have her in any context, even just a casual acquaintance where we see each other in person, even if not frequently, or have a close relationship. So much of the obsession and pain was about not getting to have any contact with her but seeing her whole life displayed across my phone screen and along with that, knowing she did not like me, even just a little bit, when I found her to be so amazing. She was so open about herself and life and constantly shared. Even if she was just a customer at my job back then who chatted with me once in a while, I would have loved it. But we weren’t in each other’s lives at all, never even talked online much.
Haven’t seen her in person or social media since then. I used to be afraid, even years later, if I saw her, my love would be rekindled and be too much to bear, but now I couldn’t care less. I feel that I would be indifferent if I saw her now but not completely sure. I don’t know if it can all come flooding back. Hope not. I don’t think I’m brave enough to look her up even if I was curious. I hope I don’t decide to. LoL The more I think about it the more I feel and fear something may be re-sparked 😆 I don’t think I can handle that pain again. I don’t know how I survived it back then and don’t feel that I can again. It’s not even the grief itself but the depression it may trigger that I am most concerned about. Rejection, loss, heartache is something nearly everyone alive experiences. It’s part of living and loving, and that can be bad enough. But when we are someone who is prone to s*icidal depression, it’s a terrible mix. It may or may not trigger a depressive episode. But it very well could. In general I am emotionally healthy and can handle stuff. But I am prone to depression, and when that depression flares, I’m not emotionally healthy. Some people are never depressed but they are not emotionally healthy either.
I cannot imagine having to bear that pain again, the grief and the depression. Being too cowardice to tell someone we love them and they not knowing we exist, is one thing, painful enough, but being rejected by them is something else. It takes away all hope and possibility that we’ll have them as our own. I don’t get depressed about anything I want and don’t get. I was out of work for two months when my previous job closed and never got depressed. There are jobs I wanted and was rejected for, even told I wasn’t qualified or experienced and that others were, and that did not depress me. Disappointed? Yes, but not depressed. There are people I liked who did not like me back. I was told before that I’m not pretty enough for a man when a mutual friend tried setting us up(obviously I wasn’t going to go out with him anyway lol)…and none of this depressed me. It doesn’t always depress me. But some of it can, especially when intense love isinvolved.
It’s absolutely not someone else’s obligation to love me, accept me, keep me….just so I don’t become depressed and s*icidal, and I never ever have thought that it is. It’s my obligation to become aware as best as I can, of my own triggers, and navigate them the best I know how. I wouldn’t try to avoid them in general as that would not be living. The only way to avoid loss and rejection is to avoid people, which I would never do. But if someone makes it clear they don’t want me, the appropriate thing to do is cut them off and let go as much as possible. It’s no one’s fault at all if I become depressed/s*icidal. That’s my own condition. Yes, things can trigger it, including things that someone else may do, and things that others do can sometimes help make it better, (like just a brief message to say hello) but that’s my responsibility, no one else’s.
I had to stop looking at her blog/accounts years ago, because it was so so painful even though her face brought me joy, I used to think about looking her up a couple years later, to see what she is up to and hoping she is happy and to see that beautiful face, but my hands would be shaky, heart racing, and I would think it would all come back and who knows what emotions would surface and resurface. So I avoided it. It was because of the rejection of being unfriended. Even just being ignored or not knowing I exist is different. But she had a reason to explicitly unfriend and all I can think of is it must have been too deep for her even though she was a deep person herself. Or the age? But we can be friends with people at any age. And she had younger friends.
I felt I would never again meet anyone like her and no one else would do(I felt this for women before and after her too but not always this strongly). Being prone to depression makes things more challenging because I never know when a painful situation that would be just painful to anyone else, will trigger a s*icidal depressive episode in me. Seeing her face again, if it rekindles something, can possibly lead to an episode where if I wasn’t prone to depression, it would be sad but not dangerous and triggering.
For a long long while I wasn’t even curious about her anymore but my trip down memory lane is getting me. LoL I hope she is happy and healthy wherever she is. I was never at all angry at her and always saw her rejection of me as totally valid, just sucked for me. lol My love for her that way is either gone or dormant. I still love her, but not like that. I love her in a universal sense, wishing her the best in life. And I also love the her I remember as a person. I have warm emotions when I remember her, but not in a way that I want a close relationship with her any longer. She was a genuinely likable person. I think anyone would like her company.
She was passionate about photography as was I (still am!), and we loved the same kind of photography. So after she ghosted me, I kept taking all kinds of pictures of things I knew she would like, trying to impress her. I thought maybe she was stalking my account. I have a feeling even now that she was(wouldn’t be surprising if she still is). She was that kind of person. She would cut people off and still look at their social media accounts/blogs years later. She also looked up people she had no intention of ever communicating with, people she knew years ago and did not like. This next part I’m going to write is very distressing to some so just a heads up. It’s about ass*ult……… she was brutally r*ped years before by a man (if you even want to call that a man) she was attracted to. One day he randomly att*cked her. And she looked him up years later and stalked his and his wife’s Facebook and Instagram accounts. He was single back then and now had a wife and kids and seemed very happy. She was furious and shattered that he got to live a normal life of happiness while she was still suffering with debilitating depression and panic attacks and psychosis decades later because of what he did. She had severe ptsd. She said it was so unfair.
I felt every bit of this. There are no words to describe this feeling that someone wrecked your life (or the life of someone you love with every inch of your sinew) and gets to go on living a happy life of love and family and friends and work satisfaction, while you (or the one you love) are broken beyond repair even after decades of therapy and medication and shock therapy and trying so hard to achieve some semblance of recovery and normalcy. She described in great detail what it felt like. And I felt it secondhand, every ounce of it and with an additional layer adding to it because I was in love with the woman experiencing it firsthand and describing it. And it burned in me. It burned like a hot rod impaling every inch of me. My skin was hot.
She had to keep leaving work even decades later for disability and hospitalizations. He had no idea she was looking at his accounts. So I believed she was likely stalking mine and tried whatever I could to win her heart.
I remember the fury I felt for him since I met her. A man I never met. A nameless, faceless man who existed only in the crevices of my brain, a figment of my imagination, an apparition, untouchable, unknowable. A dark hazy figure. A shadow of a man. But somehow still so real to me, a figure of substance, making my fury for him palpable. I carried this wh!te hot fury, my whole body inflamed and hot, like a cauldron of poison overflowing, at the thought of someone being able to hurt even a strand of hair on the head of the woman I loved beyond words, more than life. I have never known such v!olent rage like a fire burning passionately, relentlessly, in the deepest depths of my being, rising to the surface, shooting daggers through the pupils of my eyes. I used to fantasize about wrecking his life the way he wrecked hers, ruining his career, framing him for something else to make up for getting away, destroying his property. I came to intimately understand the saying”Love makes you do crazy things.”
The lasting effect this has on me is, I am now a bit hesitant to express the depth of my emotion for people for fear of being “too much” or coming on too strongly. Sometimes I want to compliment someone and think maybe I shouldn’t or maybe I should tone this down a bit before I seem obsessed. Even if it’s just a compliment to a stranger I don’t plan on encountering again, I often hesitate and think will this be off putting or scare them away if it’s too sappy or something and I think back to this.
Another lasting effect having known her has on me is it inspires me to be even more open about my experiences and things(like this). Sometimes I wonder if something is too much or an overshare, and I remember her and what she said about how sharing all of us, gives people more of an opportunity to truly love us. If they know our ugly parts, our clingy parts, our awkward and embarrassing aspects…they get the chance to truly love who we are than if they only knew the positive. This post is an example of something I wasn’t sure I should share very in depth. And I remembered it’s exactly the kind of thing she would share, with self deprecating humor throughout.
It also taught me that “You’ll only regret the things you don’t say” is nonsense. I regretted the ish out of sending those messages. lol I was embarrassed after reading the endless sap I wrote and was embarrassed even years later, thinking of it and how it probably creeped her out. Now it’s just whatever. But I can’t say I’m glad I sent it. LoL There’s still a slight cringe when I think of it. Also, just remembered I sent her a bunch of love song lyrics. Omg just k!ll me now 😆 Imagine a strange woman coming out of nowhere and expressing this undying love for you and sending love song lyrics to Oldie songs. No wonder she unfriended my account 😹 But then again, I wouldn’t mind if a woman came out of the blue to love me. There’s a way not to be creepy about it though. I guess I crossed the line into creepy?
Though, she was the same way, coming on strong. She shared that she often shared too much info and it made people uncomfortable. She loved Oldies music (but loved rap and hip hop more) and love songs like me, and she would share songs she liked. Much of what I wrote to her was referring to specific things she shared in posts and videos. So I shared lyrics to love songs and Oldies songs I loved, with her. LoL
Also, she inspired me to read more novels. I always loved educational texts. She loved love stories, and I began to read more of them. I became hooked, and to this day, still love them.
After writing all this and thinking about it, I began to long for what could have been if she loved me back. It was absolutely one of the most difficult experiences I ever endured, to the point it physically sickened me. My body was ill. I felt like she was my other half. The other half of my “soul.” (I felt this again for other women after her and it was also painful. I usually don’t reach out to them and they don’t know I exist) I still think we could have been perfect together if only it wasn’t for that one little thing, whatever it was, that turned her off.
I will say, in my defense, this is not as creepy as it may sound here. Embarrassing, awkward, definitely, but it wasn’t like I was a creep or perv or whatever like so many men who message women. My messages had one hundred percent good intentions. I did want a relationship with her but wanted to lavish all the love I could, onto her. All I wanted was to love her. And her love me too. I completely respected and accepted her boundaries. I never sent her a message again or a friend request after she ignored and unfriended my messages/account. I did not follow up with “Why did you unfriend me/do you hate me/what did I do wrong?” or “F*ck you” like SO many men do to women when they send us compliments or ask us out and we ignore or reject them. I did still look at her accounts for a while but they were public and it’s not like she blocked me and I came back under other accounts. I knew where she lived and worked (not in a creepy way, she was open about it) and never once tried to stalk her. lol It never even occurred to me.
This should go without saying but just in case, I’m going to say it. LoL
I wasn’t under the delusion that she was in love with me back, though I did think at the very least, she would like to get to know me and maybe hang out like an acquaintance (and this would have been good enough for me). People usually do like people who are similar to them and have the same interests, values, goals…and she was very social and welcoming of people in general and usually responded to the messages that I could see on social media, blog, youtube…, so there was no reason for me to think she wouldn’t like or respond to me when I sent her messages (mine weren’t public). I still wished her the best(just in my head) and hoped she was happy. So yeah, I was kind of obsessed and a bit much, and too sure she would like me. lol But I fear this may come off creepier than it was. It was more compliments about her than anything. I knew her insecurities and tried to build her up and I knew the good work she did helping people and complimented her on it, genuinely. And I told her my own experiences to show her someone understands and she isn’t alone. It reminds me of Billy Joel’s lyrics “I won’t hold back anything, and I’ll walk away a fool or a king.” I did not hold back anything. And I sure walked away a fool.
Also, there were always strangers in her comments section on her blog, social media, YouTube… spilling their whole life stories, about depression, r*pe, abuse…and all, and she responded to nearly all of them, with compassion and concern, so it wasn’t that she was uncomfortable with a stranger sharing deep and unpleasant things with her.
I have a feeling that just having this experience is good for something and I am happy that I can love like this. It’s beautiful even when I’m not loved back. And it’s one of my greatest sources of joy in life, just to feel this love. I often say it’s better to reach out in love and it doesn’t work out than not reach out. So at least I tried.
I admit that I was arrogant back then. I was conceited. I thought I was all that and a bag of Skittles. I thought I was everything she needed and everything she wanted. I thought I could love her like no one else ever did. I thought I knew her so well and could love her accordingly. I thought she would think I was stunningly beautiful and amazing if only she would look at me. I wanted her to think I was beautiful like I thought she was beautiful. I thought all she had to do was look my way, and the rest would be history.
I’m embarrassed about my arrogance and I’m glad she toned it down. To think I had this idea and plan and she would just fall into it and go right along because it’s what I wanted. To think we were soulmates because I felt so. I am very careful now, not to be that arrogant anymore when I like someone, even in a regular platonic way. I don’t assume they will like me back or that I have anything they need or want. While I don’t have low self esteem (except sometimes when I’m depressed), I think this experience kind of pushed me the other way to a degree sometimes. When I love a woman, I sometimes think I don’t really have anything she wants or needs. I don’t think she thinks I’m pretty or attractive in any way. This is especially true when I am depressed.
I used to think my love for people is just what they need and that my hugs would be so healing. I don’t know if that was arrogant of me or what. It kind of seems so, but that wasn’t my intention. But I have always had compassion urges to hug people in need who I know like hugs or show them kindness, especially people I know and have emotional connection to, but even strangers. I have always loved Free Hug Days. I’m still like this, but since then, I don’t have that feeling as much that my love/hugs can really help anyone. Sometimes I wonder if there’s even a point in reaching out in love, in offering a hug, in showing love/care/concern…like those people probably have many people they can turn to for a loving hug or words of affirmation or whatever, why would my love/hug be so great that it helps them?? I don’t always think this way but have since the rejection. It wasn’t until revisiting my experience with the woman I loved and her rejection of me that I realized this is rooted in her rejection. I tried to love her and believed my love for her would do her good, but it only turned her off. I realize now that it kind of marked me, thinking my love isn’t anything anyone needs. And when I catch myself wanting to love someone, even a stranger, I judge myself for being arrogant and tell myself to tone it down, to not expect that I can help or touch them for the better with my kindness. This isn’t always, and it’s mostly when my depression is acting up. But I can tell it’s rooted in the rejection all those years ago.
And to think I’m told every now & again by non aromantic/asexual people that I’m “lucky” to be aromantic/asexual because I’ll “never know the heartbreak of rejection or breakups.” LoLz If you say so.
I still love her, I always will. But not like that. She will always be one of my life soulmates and hold a tender place in my heart. That cannot ever change.
I loved rereading this after I wrote it. It made me giddy to remember that kind of love and know I have it in me to love like that again and possibly be loved back. I was able to summon the feels. It fills me with hope and possibility. Where in the world I’ll find her, I don’t know. It can seem impossible because it’s not the usual romantic/sexual kind of love most experience but it’s not the same as having a best friend, and it’s for my own gender. It’s so much easier to get a man or our “opposite” gender. But knowing I have it in me to experience this makes me so happy. 😍
I think the only way I can be loved back like this is if someone is romantically in love with me because most don’t experience the emotional/alterous attraction without the romantic aspect. It’s very hard to find another aroace with leanings like me. I wouldn’t mind being loved, romantically, by a woman and I can love her back in my own way. I can reciprocate affection, physical and verbal, because I have those leanings. Just nothing sexual. It’s not easy to find. But I am very happy and fulfilled with regular close friends also! It’s not less fulfilling or valid, just different. ♥️
I realized I miss her. Even after all these years, and I still have a bit of grief, it’s true. Not in a way where I want that relationship with her that I so so deeply longed for back then, but just miss her as a person, even just online. I would like to have a person like that again in this life of mine, even just as a social media friend. Not that I don’t have great people online or who I see in person now, like at work and just online friends. But the experience with her was different. Everyone is different, and most people aren’t as open about everything as she was. And I don’t love most people how I loved her. I miss her humor and photography that inspired me. I miss her wisdom. I miss her face and the joy it brought me to see her smile. I miss how she celebrated all the simple joys of each season like I do. How she celebrated the crisp Fall leaves in Autumn, and the rain misted flower petals in the Springtime, the way she loved the snow covered pavements and bare tree branches in Winter, and the sun reflecting off the windows on all the buildings around us in the Summer. Me too. I miss how she saw everything like I do, the beauty in the mundane, the extraordinary in the ordinary. She would see an empty coffee cup left by a stranger on an outside table at a cafe and take a picture to showcase its beauty. And that couldn’t be any more me. That is so rare. I also miss loving someone that way. I miss the possibility, that feeling like maybe, just maybe, she’ll one day be mine. Even after the rejection, I held out hope; that hope got dimmer and dimmer before it eventually went out. But just that faint flicker of hope kept me going so many days. This missing isn’t a bad thing, just part of my experience. It is quiet, sad, mellow. But not negative. There’s something quite beautiful about it. She accentuated that experience in me, the way I experience sad and broken things as beautiful, as works of art. How things seem a tad more beautiful when a hint of sorrow in thrown into the mix.
That’s another way I realized I am still marked by her. I knew back then but realized even more today how she more inspired that in me. She inspired me to read more novels and artistically capture the beauty in sadness and see rainy days as beautiful paintings of life. She loved the rain and how it brings out color, how the color looks drippy like paint in rainy photos, a reminder of how the storms of life can inspire us to see the beauty that is still around. I love this because it shows how even when it doesn’t work out with someone, and even if it doesn’t end on good terms and even years later, they can inspire good in us. Unlike what I thought back then about becoming a more superficial version of myself after her, it’s just the opposite. I am deeper now and have gems brought out in me that wouldn’t have been. They were in me all along, but she brought them out just by having the courage to be and reveal herself. I am inspired all over again to be raw and open and me. For the last few years, I have been struggling with my depression flaring more frequently and more deeply because of loss of long-term friendships I had and having no true friends anymore. It’s difficult to be as social as me and have no close friends in person. Even when I’m not depressed and am happy, it’s painful. And I haven’t been as inspired or overall as happy as when I had friends. I’m still happy when my depression isn’t flaring, but it’s less happy than when I have friends. Writing this inspired me to embrace me again and practice self love. I haven’t been as self loving since feeling abandoned by friends.
Yes, I do miss her. I wonder about her and hope so much she is happy now.
If this sounds like a big set up for codependency, it wasn’t lol That word is thrown around so loosely these days and everyone is accused of it (people like sounding like experts online lol), it’s hard to know what exactly it is. But if I understand correctly it’s an abusive relationship where one needs the other, and that one needs to be needed. It’s some twisted stuff, and that is NOT what I had in mind for us. I did have a relationship like this before with a woman, a frenemy situation going on that I was conscious of, and we were both guilty of it. I pretended to need her, and she needed to be needed. I had an insecurity that she was fulfilling in me or easing it in me. I did not love her but pretended to because I loved the idea of us. I pretended to be someone I wasn’t around her, changed my whole way of talking and all, still have old messages that show how very fake I was(so was she, it was mutual lol) This was so toxic to my mental health, my mental health got so much better after I ended that relationship. This was before I found the woman I loved again years later. I realized by the way I wrote how I wanted to take care of her, people may get the wrong idea; that’s only because I liked her and she had issues, not that I wanted her to need me. I wanted a mutually loving relationship and wanted her to get better, not stay broken so she can keep needing my validation and stuff. I wanted our relationship equal and healthy. But I will say again, like I mentioned somewhere in this post, that I am the protector/giver. It’s my nature. So if I were in a close relationship, I would naturally be the main giver, giving affection, compliments, validation (to a healthy extent, not excessive, lol), and if that person prefers to receive, that can work in a healthy way. Some degree of validating and taking care of each other is healthy and “normal.” We should complement each other though, not feel we need each other to be worthy and want the other one to stay low just so we can provide. Relationships of any kind, platonic or not, should be equal sided, mutual, adding extra joy and meaning and value, not one providing all to get the thrill of being needed, while the other is clingy and keeps taking. I wanted to take care of her because of the love I had for her, and she just happened to have issues that I wanted tohelp her heal.
So here is my story! I found it so healing and enlightening to revisit and write. I did not realize how I still had some pent up emotion surrounding this experience. Writing this story healed me in ways I did not realize I still needed healing almost ten years after the rejection. It was cathartic, and there were pent up emotions, wounds needing an outlet, needing a voice, needing validation, needing to be honored, held. I am so thankful I got the opportunity and found the courage to put into words and share what I never thought I could.
I welcome comments, thoughts, anyone else’s experiences with heartbreak, love, rejection…only thing not welcome is anything debating the validity or existence of my identity/orientation and absolutely nothing homophobic.
I hope you are having a beautiful day or night wherever in the world you are and wishing you lots of love. Thank you to anyone who reads this long post if anyone does! It wasemotionally exhausting to write because of the length and all. But it was a great journey back through my memory! And somehow it gave me hope. I loved feeling all those feels again, particularly the uplifting ones. LoL And it really did make me laugh. 😁 With some self exploration, I know I don’t want her anymore, but definitely want someone. Remembering all the joy was so pleasant but I don’t want it with her. I’m not going to look her up. I’ll leave that in the past. I admit I am still embarrassed and would be even more to see her again, not knowing if she remembers or forgot all about it. Anyway, it was a good ride!
“When you’re weary, feeling small
When tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all (all)
I’m on your side, oh, when times get rough
And friends just can’t be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down” ~ Simon & Garfunkel ❤
“When I first learned about her, no less than two million buffalo stampeded across my chest. (That is just an estimate at the risk of sounding dramatic.) When the dust finally settled, when chaos clipped its own wing & the Earth relinquished her thunder, I found the remains of a heart not twenty feet from my aching body, trampled into a bloody mess. This heart did not belong to me, but I ripped open my own ribcage just to double-check.” ~ Amanda Torroni
Look at that beautiful smile!! So bright, so genuine. I miss it so so much!! I love her so, so much!!! I miss her! I wish so desperately to see her and laugh with her again. I haven’t seen her beautiful face in person since February 2015. I used to see her so often. Looking at her picture, I am healed in a deeper way and I feel light and joy and gratitude even with my pain. ❤ ❤ I couldn't bring myself to look at it for a while. I am incredibly thankful to see her face. I feel so complete. I still see her face so clearly in my head but to physically see a picture is so amazing.
Today is the one year anniversary of my close friend, Diane's death. It still feels so new and messed up. It has been a very difficult journey of grief and I know in some ways it always will be. It's one of the hardest things I have ever had to endure in this life. Sometimes I feel I'm in a nightmare I can't wake up out of.
The pain throbs throughout my whole existence.
Valentine's Day was Diane's favorite holiday.
Diane is my friend and was my coworker and she died one year ago at work. Just out of nowhere. She wasn't sick or anything. She was loud, funny, giving, compassionate, loving, full of life. And in an instant she was gone and so many are now shattered. She is so loved by so, so many people and always will be.
I worked with her for nearly ten years. I never imagined being without her. Especially like this. She was (still is) so much a part of this life of mine day after day, year after year and it feels strange and unnatural that now she's gone.
Diane used to stay at work late without getting paid just to help people. Like me, she never liked turning customers away even after we closed so she would stay open after hours and serve them if there were a few stragglers. She was hilarious even when she was angry at someone or something. She would tell people off if they did something she did not like but she still showed love to them. She was mouthy and sometimes sarcastic. I remember one of the first days after I met her, years ago, I said something to her and she said "well yeah no shit" in a sarcastic way and I did not appreciate it. Lol I thought she had nerve getting flippant with me. But now I think it's hilarious and I miss every bit of her sarcasm. She wasn't even trying to be funny, she just was.
Her last word to me, last year, a few days before she died, was "unfuckingbelievable!" She was pissed when she yelled it and I was amused and I'm still amused. It makes me giggle that that happens to be the last word I heard her say. It's "so her." If only I knew, I wouldn't have walked away, I would have ran back and embraced her and never let go. I would have clung to her and tried to keep her heart going forever. ❤ </3 ❤ I would have given her my own heart if I could have. I would have cracked open my own chest, ripped my bleeding heart out and handed it to her.
Let's be as loving as possible and try to make it so the hearts of people we encounter have less negative stress. Stress can contribute to a heart attack probably. I don't ever want it to happen to anyone else. </3 ❤
She wanted to learn to speak Spanish. She loved strawberry ice cream and peanut chews and Coca Cola. We have a lot of similar loves. She used to also like bananas with whipped cream and chocolate syrup. She loved to help people. She would always be giving her last dollar to someone else, letting people in need stay with her, inviting me to holidays at her place in case I had no plans.
She used to tell me almost no man is good enough for me, even some of her own family members who had the hots for me! Lol I don't agree that someone isn't "good enough" for me but it always made me giggle when she said it, especially about her own close family members! One of her family members was thinking about asking me out and she told him "don't you dare go near that sweet girl until you get your life together!" lol She used to often tell me "I love you girl!" and make me lunch and always trying to give me money even though she hardly had money herself. She used to borrow money then give it to others who needed it. She was extremely protective & generous.
She was always trying to help me find a job, always writing down names and numbers and places for me. She was even going to take my resume to give to people she knew to try to help me get a job. So many occasions through the years I overheard her bragging to others about how amazing I am in a way that made it sound like I was her own daughter. I always felt her love but now when I think about it I realize just how deep that love for me ran. I did not lose her love; I keep it with me always. ❤
She has three adult sons and grandkids. And lots of other family members. I still see them around sometimes. She has a big loving family.
I see her son Thomas and her granddaughter, Kaitlyn and Kaitlyn's baby boy the most. I'm so happy when I see them.
❤
She would make sure I had anything I wanted and scold me if she thought I was doing something not good for myself. She was always checking, making sure I had enough food.
I can't believe she's gone and still keep thinking how can this be….how can she really be gone for good? Can it really be? I know this experience isn't unique to me even though it can feel like it. Many people who lose someone so close feel this way off and on even years later, possibly forever. Our story isn't unique. People die so frequently of sudden heart complications. People die every single day in all kinds of ways. Every single day people are left grieving and confused over the loss of close friends, family members, pets, others they know and love. It's just the way it goes.
But we can feel so lonely in our grief.
I remember her long gray coat in the Winter and her long blue denim shorts and t-shirts in the summer. I remember her hearing aids and her black hair. I remember her voice. I remember she walked with a cane or leg brace at one point because she was injured. I remember she had asthma and had a bad attack at work one day. I remember it was scary. I remember so much. Sometimes I find it so healing to talk about her.
I feel so light when I talk about her. Not mentioning her death. I'm not in denial about it. I just don't want to think about it.
And I remember her life, not the horrible circumstance of her death. My mom did not know her but when Diane was alive, I frequently talked about her to my mom and texted my mom while at work so many days telling her all the hilarious things Diane did and said. And all the sweet, thoughtful things she did for others and for me.
"Oh the rhythm of my heart is beating like a drum
with the words ‘I love you’ rolling off my tongue
No never will I roam for I know my place is home
where the ocean meets the sky
I'll be sailing"
Mobile:
Desktop:
She was a big Rod Stewart fan (like me!). That's why I'm dedicating Rhythm of My Heart in her memory.
I was recently looking through old stuff I have, looking for an old philosophy book, and I found this cd case.
I love how I found it right before the first year anniversary and I instantly thought of her.
I love and miss her every single day. I think of her in everything I do and see things every day that remind me of her. I will always think of her and love her everyday until I take my last breath. My heart breaks for her and her friends and family.
I am shattered by our loss but I will honor her in so many things I do. I will keep on loving like she did, like she encouraged me to always do. She was so loving.
She loved my warm, gentle nature that is in some ways in contrast with her loud, assertive one. She told me to never let it change. I never plan to.
I’m filled with immense gratitude that I got to know her for the decade I spent with her. Sometimes my gratitude is drowned out by the grief but usually the grief is healed to a certain point through my gratitude. Usually the happy memories bring me deep joy and happiness and laughter & smiles along with my grief but sometimes they mostly only serve to deepen my pain. Some days it fluctuates overwhelming raw grief to a healing kind of gratitude, back & forth. And some days it’s more pain than gratitude while other days it’s more gratitude and smiles than overwhelming pain. But generally it’s a combination of both. Every fiber of my being is in agony over this loss and it would be like this for any friend/family member I lose and am close to, including pets, whether I knew them for years or even just days, all that matters is the depth of our friendship. Grief just hurts.
I have so much sorrow, not just for us who lost her, but for her for not living anymore and experiencing everything she loved, for missing it. This is what kills me the most usually. I know she’s not suffering but she’s dead and it’s worse because she can’t heal or feel happiness or anything. At least us who are left grieving can find a sense of healing and still be happy. But at least she lived and had love & happiness & life and touched so many others. That’s all that matters now.
It doesn’t get better, it’s just the longer I live with it, the more “used to it” I become so I can cope with it better usually. But I can never truly get used to it. Sometimes it feels like I’m drowning. Like I’m being submerged in water and struggling to keep my head above and breathe. It’s overwhelming.
Sometimes my grief is so raw it hurts almost physically. Then it mellows out and gets softer and quieter and easier to bear until the next raw flare up. But it never goes away. I don’t want it to. Ever.
It doesn’t interfere with my general happiness or my ability to function. It’s not depression. When it flares up to the raw pain though, sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on other things.
When Diane died, almost everyday I felt like some physical part of me was missing. I felt like I was missing a limb that got ripped off and felt like in its place was numbness as well as pain. I kept feeling like it should be here. I felt a tingling. I don’t know where I felt that sensation exactly, just all over my body and other parts that aren’t physical. I especially felt it when I would be at work, shortly after she died and sometimes I still feel it. I walked around in a fog for days and days. The initial shock wore off but in some way I’m just as shocked as when it happened. And now the shock can’t numb most of the pain like it did at first. So now I’m shocked and in pain and sometimes numb like when it happened.
There’s nothing like having to go back to work after losing a coworker to unexpected death. Seeing the empty desk. Standing in the place we used to stand together and the space next to me, empty. Not hearing her laugh.
Not hearing her funny stories. Showing up for my shift which was also her shift and she’s not there. I seriously dreaded going back to work the first days after it happened.
She used to sit at her desk and read a newspaper and eat peanut chews, drinking coca cola soda. We would often visit each other after closing at night to say I love you & goodnight or bring each other stuff. Some nights after work it aches so deeply when I walk by and she’s not there. But I’m so healed by the memories and the love.
Sometimes, especially at first, it wouldn’t feel like it can really be real. I wanted to physically collapse everyday in my deep anguish. Sometimes I still do. It hits me at the most inconvenient moments, on a crowded bus, walking to work, out shopping, trying to sleep, on my way to therapy appointments(i don’t like to talk about it), …. It’s much too painful.
After she died, I would lean out the window at work and stare across the street (that’s where she worked for our boss, in the bar kitchen across the street) and wonder if it’s really real. We used to look out and wave to each other, laughing. I would look out day after day desperate to see her face, her beautiful smile, but she wasn’t looking back. She never looked back. I kept checking over and over to see if maybe it was some kind of mistake, some really big misunderstanding, even though I knew it’s not. Maybe no one really died I kept telling myself. Maybe they were wrong, maybe I was dreaming and now I’m awake and my nightmare is over. But I knew that is not the case. Occasionally I still look over and half expect to see her. But I know I won’t.
I loved being near her. I loved her bubbly presence I felt. She loved me as soon as she met me. She talked to me right away like we already knew each other very well.
She was my coworker but I love her like a close friend. If she was my family or friend outside of work I still wouldn’t love her more. She was always a friend to me. And my pain shatters me completely and is unreal. It’s all encompassing and takes over every aspect of me sometimes. Sometimes I can’t believe this pain. Sometimes I wonder how anyone can survive it. It reminds me of my physical pain disorder when it flares up to unbearable levels. Grief is still easier to handle than my physical head pain even though it’s not less painful. But some aspects are incredibly similar. The magnitude of the pain of both the headache & the grief is unfathomable.
But I go on and on and keep her with me. And she is still a significant part of me. She’s no less a part of me than when she was alive. I never go a single day without thinking of her. She’s always on my mind. I always feel her here within. I don’t see or talk to her anymore and know I never will again and I don’t believe she can see or hear me but I keep my memories of her and my love for her close and the love she had for me still lives in me. I rebuild my self to make room for this grief I now live with. Grief & gratitude and grief & joy and grief & happiness can live together. Side by side. Harmoniously.
I don’t want anyone else to die like this and I don’t want anyone else to suffer like us over a loss like this. It’s bullshit. There are worse ways to die and worse ways to lose someone but it’s still bullshit that this happens to people.
I want people to see her face and read her name and read how loving and beautiful she was. And I want anyone who has lost someone, maybe a friend or coworker or pet or mom or neighbor, anyone, to feel less alone. And anyone who has suffered a traumatic loss or some other trauma to feel some sense of consolation. Sometimes reading someone else’s experience can be comforting or inspiring or empowering.
Sometimes I’m so angry about it. Not as frequently as when her death occurred. But still sometimes I feel like screaming “fuck you” to no one in particular. I’m not angry at a person or her for dying. Or at the uni-verse or some god. I accept the fact that Diane is dead, I have never denied it, but I don’t like it. I don’t feel that it’s unfair. It can happen to anyone and would be just as bad if it were someone else, someone I don’t know, and we’ll all probably go at one point one way or another. Some people are blessed to live to be 80 years old or older and die of old age while others unfortunately die much too young. It’s just the way it goes and always has been. But sometimes I am furious about the situation. I feel like how dare this happen. She was 58 years old and could have lived many more years. Isn’t this bullshit?
“Fuck” is exactly what Diane would have been yelling! Lol Unfuckingbelievable!
It is Unfuckingbelievable. There’s no other word for it.
I can still find laughter in my grief.
In a way, I don’t feel as if I really lost anything because I got to know her in the first place. Our lives could have never crossed but they did so it’s not a complete loss, I still have her love with me and my memories. So instead of mostly dwelling on what I lost, I think of the blessing this life bestowed upon me when it gifted me with our friendship and I focus on that and my gratitude. Why dwell on what has been snatched away when I can instead more frequently give thanks for what has been “given” to me. And her beautiful family is still here to keep her memory alive so a big part of her still lives.
My heart goes out to all those people who have lost someone to a heart condition(or any way at all – grief is the worst pain there probably is, at least for many…). It’s one of the most common ways people die and it sucks! Let’s keep the memory of their beautiful hearts in our own loving hearts, always. ❤ ❤
I hope anyone who is suffering with grief will remember grief is the price we pay for love. It's an indication that we are touched by those no longer here on Earth with us. But even with seemingly unbearable pain over our loss/es, we can still eventually be happy, grateful, full of laughter & joy along with our terrible pain and grief. Grief and missing someone and happiness and gratitude are not mutually exclusive. We can miss them terribly and be sad but still be generally very happy.
In Loving Memory of our beautiful Diane, July 14th, 1956 – February 14th, 2015 </3 ❤
I wish most of the healing energy and thoughts and things to her friends & family who knew and love her outside of work, her three sons and her grandchildren who she was very close with and her siblings…as hard as it is for me I know in some ways it must be even harder for them.
I'm so shocked and thrilled the song "Rhythm of My Heart" started playing as I was writing about dedicating it to Diane! Then again! Lol I was writing a post to dedicate it to her a while ago but never posted it and saved it for now. My playlist was on shuffle as I was writing the previous post, back then! And it came on randomly just as I was dedicating it to her! Then as I'm writing this one, it started playing again! ❤ ❤
“It felt like spring time on this February morning
In a courtyard birds were singing your praise
I’m still recalling things you said to make me feel alright
I carried them with me today”
I found this fortune on the floor near the door when I walked into work today. It brightened my day and made me smile. And it reminds me to smile at the very next person I look at (which I did! And he smiled back! 😀 ).
Last night I had difficulty sleeping. My grief kept me awake. It tends to do that some nights.
But my adorable dogs know when I’m in serious pain whether it’s physical or emotional and they show me extra love. Lol It’s so cute!! ❤
One of the strange things about grief is how one moment it can be quiet, soft, mellow, calm, easy to bear then the very next moment it can be raw, agonizing, violent, nearly unbearable. It appears and reappears for many of us as long as we live, no matter how long ago the loss occurred. I still feel this for my dog who died of old age in 2013 and others I knew and love.
Last night I was thinking about how in just a few weeks, it will be the first anniversary of my close friend/coworker's unexpected death. It has been a long exhausting journey of grief this last year. Full of beauty & pain. Light & darkness. Love & hope.
One year is just a social construct and it seems strange and interesting to think about it. Our society places so much importance on anniversaries each year. This can be good or be very painful. Or both?
My grief exacerbates to nearly unbearable levels off and on throughout my days. And while it's so hard sometimes, I know that's ok. It will be like that. I no longer try to battle it usually. It's not something to be battled.
It's just a natural reaction to our losses. So I let it appear, do what it will, and then mellow out to the more bearable levels until the next raw flare up whenever it may be.
Sometimes I still have trouble doing this though. Sometimes I want to resist that grief that hurts so much.
Last night as I laid down to sleep, it just hit me. So unexpectedly. My beautiful friend never leaves my mind and my grief never leaves me either. But like I said, my grief now is usually bearable.
But last night as I thought of the first anniversary approaching, the pain came at me like daggers piercing every square inch of my being. I thought of all the beautiful days we shared together in the last decade. All the love she has shown me and the love I still have for her and always will. But last night the happy memories weren't enough to soothe the pain. In some way, they even worsened it. Somehow though, I finally drifted off to sleep with her beautiful face across my mind.
“Oh darlin’ as I lay me down to sleep
This I pray, that you will hold me dear
Though I’m far away
I’ll whisper your name into the sky
And I will wake up happy” ❤
Today I woke up still in that terrible raw state of grief. It's worse than when she died because at least back then the shock of her unexpected death protected me against the agony that was soon coming. But when I think of her, when I speak her name, it's so healing.
As I sat at work today, a memory came to me. It was the Summer before she died. It was July, just after her 58th birthday. I was 28 years old. Diane always treated me like her own daughter. We stood together by the soda boxes in the store I work at. Her job was in the bar kitchen across the street. But she came over to the store to help me when it was busy. She absolutely loved to help people. She was a very giving person.
She often came over just to talk to me or bring me food and tell me something funny. She was hilarious, so full of life. Diane bragged about me to others constantly and always told me how wonderful I am and how she loved me. She was so proud of her sons and always sharing stories about her grandkids. She was so full of love.
I always loved how she referred to her boys as "My Thomas" and "My Matthew" and "My Daniel"
She would scold me when she thought I was doing something not good for myself like if she thought I was not eating enough food. She was always making me food and bringing it to me.
My sweet, sweet friend. I miss her like crazy. The pain is almost physical.
I always felt so close to her.
I remember her black hair blowing in the swirl of the air the fan was blowing that day. I remember her white t-shirt and long denim shorts. And her beautiful voice.
There is nothing significant about this memory. It just came to me in one of my worst moments of grief and stood out. I love how it's just a simple memory of a mundane part of an ordinary day, yet it's so vivid in my mind.
And it's a memory only I have of us together that day. There was no one else here. It feels so unique. But now it's written in stone, for the world to see at any moment of any day. And for that I am thankful.
Today I walked over to the soda box where we stood that day. I longed for her. I longed to feel her near me. My arms ached to hug her.
And as my grief reached its pinnacle and I felt it would destroy me and I was so tempted to repress and deny it, instead I let it ripple through me in agonizing waves. I let my body writhe in agony, I let myself keel over as I clutched my chest which felt like it held something inside physically breaking, as I thought of how I'll never see her again, how she'll never live again, never work again, never see her sons and family and friends again. Never again feel the wind blowing through her dark black hair. I thought of her hearing aids and how she'll never again reach up to adjust them. She'll never again eat her favorite strawberry ice cream or drink her favorite soda, which is also my favorite. Coca Cola. We both have always loved it and we both wouldn't drink Pepsi if Coca Cola was sold out. Lol Instead we drank Mt. Dew.
So I let the pain break me. As much as I wanted to resist it. I let it break me. Then I allowed myself to steal away into the stillness around me and within, the quietude, the spaciousness, the emptiness, that awaits beyond the worst of the pain. The still of this cold, desolate afternoon enveloped me in a soothing, exhilarating kind of way, giving me life & hope.
And I felt beauty. I felt calm. Love. Whole. I felt her in my loving memories and I felt healed to a certain point. Grief, for many of us never completely heals but that's ok.
It will appear and reappear and rise and fall. It will scream some moments, loud and vicious and terrible. And other moments it will softly arise in our self, floating gently and sadly but beautifully across our essence. Sometimes the happy memories will shatter us to pieces and other moments they will put us back together and help heal the darkest pain. And it's all ok. But it won't always feel ok. And that's ok too.
I was so tempted to only see the ugly in my grief today but I remembered my vow to this year refine my ability to see beauty in every moment, even the seemingly ugly ones. To deepen my sense of beauty and strengthen my philosophy of life that life is beautiful even in its darkest moments.
So I let myself stand in quiet and calm and felt the beauty rise and surge within and consume me in its glow.
And it was all ok again.
And all will be ok again.
Acceptance is a beautiful thing. It beautifies the world. We can accept our things that can't be changed and just go with the flow. And even things that can be changed, we can accept that things happen that aren't good while trying our best to help it. Acceptance doesn't mean we don't try to help it. It just means we allow whatever will be, to be and move forward doing the best we can, the best we know how.
I accept my grief and my loss. And I move forward and try to help others in any way I can, often through my writing here & sharing inspiring posts. If it just touches one person, even in some small way, it's truly amazing. ❤ ❤
“It’s not too near for me
Like a flower I need the rain
Though its not clear to me
Every season has its change
And I will see you
When the sun comes out again” ~
Sophie B. Hawkins – As I Lay Me Down
Mobile:
Desktop:
I’m wishing you much love & light today and always,
“I could sneer, I could glare say that Life is so unfair and the one who Made it, made it ’cause her breasts Were really big” ~ Jill Sobule
I have never been starstruck or celebrity crazed. I’m not into TV, the personal lives of celebrities just because they are famous, their drama or the drama people bring to them. I find it appalling that people chase them around with cameras, seriously invading their personal space, nearly getting them into accidents, stalking them, stalking and taking pictures of their kids!!!, verbally bash them out of jealousy, and all the other nonsense. The fact that they’re famous and knew this would likely occur does not make it ok or make the barbarians any less responsible for their dangerous and annoying actions. Not all famous people necessarily want to be famous. Some want to do whatever the job is and just have to accept the popularity that comes along with it. Some probably want to be actors, singers, and other things that will potentially make them famous, but not the fame itself, still wanting to live a life not being known and heckled by everyone who looks at them out in public. Fame is just a byproduct of certain jobs. Some like it. Some don’t. But whether or not they chose or want the fame doesn’t justify other people’s reckless and negative actions towards them when it’s interfering directly with their lives. I don’t believe celebrities are generally any more or any less intelligent or wise than those in the general population. They just have the ability to reach many more people and affect people at greater magnitudes because of it, usually. When they have wisdom and a message and a cause and a story, they can reach millions upon millions of people.
But we who aren’t famous can still impact a number of lives somehow. And just reaching one, touching one heart for the better is amazing. I don’t care that they’re rich. That’s the life they chose. They work for it. I can probably be rich too if I were determined, dedicated, skilled, and motivated enough to do what it takes and also desired a job that happens to have a mind-blowing paycheck come along with it. But I’m not. And I don’t care. The kind of job I want won’t make me financially rich and it doesn’t matter to me. It’s the satisfaction and value to others that the job will bring that I’m desiring.
Many people argue that celebrities don’t deserve the money just for acting or whatever. While that may be true, the point is, it’s the job they chose and most of us can choose the job we want as long as we have the appropriate skills and ability and motivation. Not all of us want to be actors or are driven or talented enough to be even if we wanted. Maybe our calling just doesn’t happen to bring with it such money. If you’re fortunate enough to strongly, passionately desire something,whatever it may be, have the skills it takes to obtain and maintain it and become financially rich, all the power to you!
And if you have all that but don’t get financially rich for it, still all the power to you! What really matters is if you’re fulfilled and living how you want! I don’t see that it’s necessarily unfair in a way, that they get so much money, more than I have and more than other jobs. Because we can all choose to seek well-paying jobs if we have the skills. We won’t always get the job quickly, it may take a while, just like some celebrities struggle for a while before a big break and sometimes even after. And if we don’t have the skills, it’s not unfair. Some people are talented and geniuses at some things and not others. Some people have natural talents while some don’t. Some people have disabilities, illnesses, obstacles that others don’t. It’s just the way the world works. Many people have so much more than me. More money, more skills, more knowledge, more wisdom, more friends, more experience ….and many have less. That goes for most of us. It is what it is. I think some people with certain jobs deserve just as much money as celebrities, and appreciation they don’t always receive, police officers, doctors, and others who save lives and risk their own. I don’t think it’s the celebrities’ fault though that they don’t get paid like that and they do.
We can make a choice to take what we have and do the best we can while letting others also do that even if they seem to have better circumstances. We can “bloom where we’re planted” while encouraging one another, celebrate each other, cheer each other on, celebrity or not. We’re all in this together. We can allow the success, happiness, accomplishments, and fortunes of other people to inspire us, motivate us, and guide us instead of letting it depress us or make us bitter or jealous. It’s true some people have it easier but no matter what obstacles stand in our way, we can prevail somehow. And even the most successful and happy, joyful people can encounter problems, pain, and stress.
Famous and rich people are not gods, not invincible, not necessarily people to look up to merely because they are celebrities, not people to hold to greater standards than other people and criticize harder when they fall, in my opinion, not people to hold grudges against or not takes seriously merely because of their celebrity status. I know some people disagree and think they’re morally obligated to be responsible and send positive messages to others. It would be great if they do but I don’t think they’re really obligated. It’s great if we all set positive examples for each other. But it’s usually not our obligation. But some are worthy of being looked up to as positive examples just like some non celebs. Rich and famous people are susceptible to pain, death, tragedy, illness, breakups, bankruptcy, bullying, abuse, breakdowns, loss, eating disorders, substance abuse, grief, mental health conditions, stress, discrimination, being detested, suicide, accidents, overdoses, being stalked, attacked, killed, assaulted….just like the rest of us.
And rich and famous people can also share deep wisdom and inspire us, and bring light & love to our world. Just like people who aren’t famous or financially rich.
“I don’t wanna get bitter like you Like you, with the darts in your eyes Like you, with disdain for mankind I was charmed, now I wonder” ~ Jill Sobule
I just found now, a celebrity who has quickly won my heart. Yup, I’m in love. Her name is Selena Gomez.
And the fact that she’s a famous person isn’t what inspires me. But if she were not famous I probably would not have the opportunity I now have been blessed with, to know her beauty. I was doing self discovery/authentic self/art journaling activities, cutting out things in random old magazines when I came across something about Selena Gomez. I heard/read her name on various occasions but never really knew anything about her, never cared to, really. Just that she’s famous. I was never sure what she’s famous for, what she looks like, or anything else. I do love reading celebrity personal interviews sometimes, no matter who they are, because I get a feel for the person’s true personality and we all know how much I love people. I’m just not more interested in celebrities than other people because of their status. I love looking at pretty girls in magazines and getting hair, makeup, clothing style….ideas and see lots of gorgeous faces and beautiful bodies all throughout the magazines but I don’t always read about celebrities, just look and cut stuff out for arts and crafts activities. I saw this page in a magazine with incredibly inspiring phrases and I was thrilled! I was about to cut them out and glue them into my journal when I saw one that says “Support Your Girls.” I assumed it was about boobs and a great bra and looking pretty. And I thought wow can’t go wrong with that one! Until I read the phrase underneath which reads “I love my girl friends more than I’ve loved any of my boyfriends….“ I realized it’s Selena Gomez who said that. And what she has to say is beyond amazing. She loves her best girls and other girls she knows of, even ones she never met personally. Her friends love and support her and stand by her always, including when the men she has been romantically involved with did not. She loves women who empower other women. Taylor Swift is one of those girls she loves who empowers other girls. And this other girl Demi. I love Taylor Swift also. She’s all for love and seems like a total sap like mee!! Selena Gomez wants girls and women to stop comparing negatively, stop the competitions with fashion, best friends, and lovers and betrayal and just love one another, empower each other, support each other unconditionally. “My wish is that girls would love girls more.” Selena even loves girls who don’t love her back! Talk about amazing! She wants the best even for women who don’t return the love. “I’m going to support her whether she likes me or not because I think she’s doing great things.” She says this of a girl, Lorde, she never met but truly adores. This girl, Lorde, doesn’t like Selena, according to Selena, at least when this interview was going on, March 2014, I think.
“Some day I will see her and we’ll be cool.“
So sweet! I have loved girls and wanted to be friends with certain girls who did not feel the same about me. I would be thinking “we would be perfect BFF’s, soul sisters, she just doesn’t know it yet!” Lol! Have you ever met a girl and think you two would just be amazing friends but she doesn’t seem to think so? It can be painful but we can still love and empower one another even if we’re not or don’t want to be friends with each other. We don’t have to wish to see each other crumble or see each other fail even if we don’t like each other. Girls who don’t like me back still have my love. There are also girls I would not want to be friends with but still send my love and well wishes. I never felt that romantic love is necessarily more important than platonic love. It’s different but not more important to me. I don’t believe romantic relationships are more worthy of special recognition than platonic friendships no matter what the gender of the people are. I love all love.
I agree that it’s best for women to build each other up, not tear each other down.
“Wise women don’t compete with each other; they empower one another.”
Selena also teaches a lesson on saying no. She says “You can’t be afraid of what people are going to say, because you’re never going to make everyone happy.“ She encourages girls to speak up when they don’t like something. She says saying it out loud is the first step to taking away fear. Say what you want. Express it when you don’t like something. She says that it took her a long while to learn this. Her friend Demi taught her this great lesson. Now she is teaching others. She explains that it’s effective to be direct, not aggressive. I had to learn this too. In cases with people taking advantage of my desire and willingness to help, I had to learn to say clearly and directly, NO. Not because I don’t want to help or be kind, not as a punishment or to seek revenge. To show people they can’t keep getting what they want by taking advantage. When people take advantage of our generosity and kindness to the point it takes a toll on us, we have to think of ourselves as well. Our own health and well-being is just as important as everyone else’s. If something doesn’t feel right to you, say no. And if you wear yourself out just constantly doing for others, eventually you may be too exhausted to help anyone well.
Selena provides a lesson on finding your inspiration. She looks to others for inspiration sometimes. Jennifer Lopez, Beyonce, Demi. She finds inspiration in their music, songs, in the different moves they make. What inspires you? Who inspires you? Look around and look within and and allow your heart to open to the inspiration all around. Then create. Do. Be.
She also encourages to “Pick your power song.” She loves her song “Who Says,” which she declares is her anthem for girls. She says that when she performs it, she stops singing and allows the girls to sing it to her so they can hear themselves say “Who says I’m not perfect? Who says I’m not beautiful? Who says I’m not worth it?” She wants girls to feel that. This is so empowering. The fact that she let’s girls sing it themselves, become active and actually engage instead of just listen is truly amazing. What a wise young woman this girl is. I feel my heart well up with love.
She encourages us to “never change for a guy” and talks about how some men may be intimidated by strong women but it’s important to remain ourselves. This goes for anyone though not just a man/lover/boyfriend/potential love interest/husband. I encourage us not to change for anyone but ourselves. Don’t change who you are for parents who want you to live out their dreams, jealous girls who want to see you fall, friends who won’t accept you as you are, society…don’t change for anyone except yourself if it serves you well to change because YOU want the change.
One of the most beautiful lessons she teaches here is “Give Your Whole Self.“ Selena says “I don’t feel like I can do enough for my fans. I work a lot, I work hard, and I get tired. But when you walk on stage and see these people who wait hours outside just to see you, it’s the greatest thing in the world.“. She states that she feels that her fans do so much for her and she doesn’t feel she can do enough for them. Her lesson is to give your whole self to people, all your love, your passion, your beauty. This can apply to any aspect of your life. Your work, hobbies your love, people you know, whatever you do, where ever you go, go with all your heart. Give it your all. Put your whole self into it. This is a beautiful way to live and love to the fullest. You don’t have to be perfect, you can be passionate and loving in all that you do. We don’t need perfection. Being passionate and loving is perfect enough.
And I think loving and truly appreciating and being grateful for her fans is enough. She embodies love so perfectly.
Selena Gomez is a wise and beautiful girl. Inside and out and our world is blessed to have her. Not for her music or work(that too) but for the powerful love she projects out into the world and the deep beauty of her life’s message. What a bright light. I would be honored to have a friend like her.
“So I’ll smile with the rest I’ll wish everyone the best And know the one who made it, Made it cuz she was actually pretty good” ~ Jill Sobule
“Too many people overvalue what they are not and undervalue what they are.” ~Malcolm S. Forbes
“By being yourself, you put something wonderful in the world that was not there before. “~Edwin Elliot
” Friends can help each other. A true friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself – and especially to feel. Or, not feel. Whatever you happen to be feeling at the moment is fine with them. That’s what real love amounts to – letting a person be what he really is.” ~ Jim Morrison
” Sometimes the heart sees what is invisible to the eye.” H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
” Where there is love there is life.” Mahatma Gandhi
” A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge.” Thomas Carlyle
“So many women just don’t know how great they really are. They come to us all vogue outside and vague on the inside.” ~ Mary Kay Ash
(picture taken somewhere in Center City, Philadelphia, I saw it on a pole and just had to take a pic!)
i have purchased a book a few months ago, and it’s called “Priceless Gifts” (How to Give the Best to Those You Love) and is written by a psychologist, Daniel A. Sugarman, Ph.D. He is a clinical psychologist and the book was published in the 1970’s. 1978 to be exact. I haven’t read the book yet but I will.
I read the list of gifts on the back cover. Even though it was written decades ago, the twelve gifts that the man lists are timeless and still apply today.
They are psychological gifts, not material gifts. This book, even though I haven’t read most of it yet, inspired me to create a list of my own, of priceless psychological /immaterial gifts that I believe are incredible to bless others with and to receive.
While my list is inspired by this doctor’s list, not all of the gifts I list here are ones in his book and the descriptions underneath each gift, even the gifts I took out of the book, are my own. Next to each gift that is also in his book, I will state that I got it out of the book.
1.) The Gift of Time(in the book): Being with someone who needs/wants you at that moment is an amazing gift. Whether you are having fun doing entertaining activities, talking to one another, or just sitting close to show you care when a person wants company is an amazing gift. It shows the person that you care enough to take part of your day and make that person your top priority at that moment. What better way to make that person feel loved, valuable, and cherished!?
2.) The Gift of Active Listening/ Undivided Attention (in the book) : We usually hear what people say and respond. But how often are we truly, fully listening? It seems we are frequently only partially or half listening while multitasking, doing other things while a person talks to us, mindlessly/mechanically responding. This is not being fully receptive of or acknowledging that person’s needs and desires at that moment. Even if you accurately hear what that person says and even provide a relevant, pleasant sounding response, that is not always good enough. A person can tell when you are not fully present even if you don’t know the person can tell and maybe even if that person doesn’t consciously know it or realize it at that moment. Make the person feel s/he is the center of your world at that moment. It can be quite offensive spilling your guts to someone only to realize that person is playing with a phone, texting someone else, watching TV, drifting off, or off somewhere daydreaming giving you empty, half mutters while you speak. Whether the person is talking to you about light topics such as her favorite food, book, or movie, or more deep topics such as his problems, pain, future dreams, that person wants your attention! S/he cares enough and believes you are important enough to talk to and trusts you enough to share with you so repay the gift and really, truly listen fully with your whole heart and drown out everything else while that person speaks. (unless you’re driving or something, be careful!)
3.) The Beautiful Gift of Loyalty: When a person shares secrets with you, s/he expects you to keep them to yourself. It’s not good to blab them to anyone. Many of us have someone we believe we can trust with someone else’s secrets but then the person we trust may also have a person or persons s/he trusts and may tell the person’s secrets to that person thinking it’s Ok to tell and that it will stop there. But then that person tells people and on and on and that’s how “secrets” get around. It’s not that the people who tell other people’s secrets are necessarily bad people and likely they don’t want to sabotage or hurt anyone. They just want to talk and be the big bearer of “news” but it does not always go over too well. So when a trusting person comes to you, it’s best to let that person’s secrets stop when they get to you. (unless it’s potentially life threatening.)
And it’s also best not to gossip about or judge a person, negatively, who trusts you, with other people. Be loyal and true to the person who opens up to you. It’s unkind and a betrayal to trash talk the person or spill their info out to others. Let the person come to you and be a true friend and listener. That is a true gift. And if you are being truly loyal you won’t join in when you hear other people saying unnecessary negative things about your friend.
4.) The Gift of Acceptance (In the book) : Just about everyone we meet is going to have at least one (probably more) opinion, trait, characteristic, or thing about him/her that we will not agree with or not like. But that does not mean we have to give the person up or not like the person or reject the person or try to change him/her. We can gently state our opinion in a kind way if it’s truly necessary and intended to help or connect with someone and then be done with it. But we can accept the person for all that person is. “Flaws” and all. We can disagree, argue, debate, but still love, cherish, tolerate, and accept. We don’t all have to be identical to get along well and love.
“I ain’t lookin’ for you to feel like me See like me or be like me All I really want to do Is, baby, be friends with you.” ~Bob Dylan
5.) The Gift of Positive Support: I think just about everyone desires and craves the true support of a great friend or family member or others. Humans are social creatures and like to belong and be accepted and want positive encouragement. We may not always agree with something a family member or friend thinks or does but we should want to see the person happy and healthy no matter what. And we can still support a person, in general, even when that person does something we oppose or thinks something we disagree with. As stated in the above gift description, we can gently and kindly state how we feel when necessary, and allow the person to think or do as s/he pleases without interference, rejection, and negative judgment. Unless a person is struggling with unsound judgment as a result of illness of any kind or alcohol or other drug intoxication, and wants to do something potentially life threatening to the person or others, we should support the person in her goals and be happy she is happy no matter what. This also goes when a person accomplishes or attains something we wish we will gain or accomplish. A little bit of jealousy is a normal emotion and is Ok. But don’t let it destroy your friendships or other relationships and happiness for that person. People will always have things we want and can’t or won’t get but we can still be happy for them even though we may feel somewhat jealous or disappointed for ourselves not having it. 6.) The Gift of Sharing/ Self Disclosure (in the book) : It is a true gift to others to hear of or read of your own problems and struggles, successes and dreams, pain, goals, failings, life lessons, and happiness. It can remind them that they are not alone and it can inspire them to feel happier and act on their dreams and it helps them get to know you and connect with you on a deeper level and trust you more. It may help them open up and share their own stories more comfortably. Sharing is caring! A healthy balance of Sharing with others and actively listening to them speak is amazing! What a true gift!
“What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” ~ Muriel Rukeyser
7.) The Gift of Seeing the best in people (in the book) : Everyone has things about them that are good and bad. No one is perfect in everyone’s eyes. Even the best people you know will have pain, setbacks, problems, failings, struggles, and negative aspects about their lives but instead of focusing on the worst in them, focus on the best!
Let the person know you cherish her/him and support her/him in her endeavors no matter what and that the good is what stands out. People want to be around those who lift them up and appreciate the great and not just criticize the bad. Think of your own “bad” or “negative” qualities. Would you like to be around people who can’t get over them and always point them out and criticize you over them? Or do you want to be in the company of people who love and nourish and cherish your amazing qualities and overlook and accept the bad? Give that gift to others! 😀
And try this: instead of saying “I love you but…..” try saying “….. but I love you!”.
8.) The Gift of letting them make their own decisions without negative judgment :
Many friends or others may want and seek your input on some things and want to know how you feel and if you are true, close friends, they will likely cherish and appreciate your desire to help and your willingness to open up and contribute to their lives. But this doesn’t mean they will or should always take heed of your suggestions or advice. In the end the decision is theirs. It is their life and they are responsible for their own life. The ultimate decision is theirs. They may not always make decisions that you like or want but you don’t have to negatively judge them or criticize them for it. And you don’t have to feel coldly rejected or seriously crushed if they should choose to not do what you suggest. It doesn’t mean they don’t value your opinions or take you seriously, just that in some cases, they have different needs or views. Provide your input and let them know you are right by their side no matter what they choose and if things do not work out well, you are still right here to help them see it through. It is good for people to allow others the space and liberty to mess up, make mistakes, experiment, be uncertain, but still support them in their attempts and experiences with true, unconditional love, acceptance, and loyalty. What better gift in this life than a friend like this?!
9.) The Gift of True Empathy:
This isn’t to say we should “feel sorry” for people in an arrogant way as if we are somehow above that person or more fortunate than that person. It is to say that we should acknowledge that other people are just as sentient as we, ourselves are. They can feel like we can and they have needs and desires as well as we do. And we should really try to a certain extent to understand how that person must feel even if we haven’t experienced the exact same thing. Not to say “I know how you feel”. That can seem cold and like you are overstepping your boundaries. The truth is unless you can literally get into someone else ‘s head you don’t know exactly how that person feels whether or not you have similar experiences. But we can have some degree of understanding and much compassion and concern for another person. Whether we know the person or not. We all have pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, and we can use our imaginations and draw on our own experiences to empathize with someone even if our experiences aren’t exactly the same. Having empathy for animals is also important.
10.) The Gift of Unconditional Love:
True love, to me, is unconditional. If I truly love someone, no matter what that person says or does, I will continue to love. I may feel the need to distance myself in certain ways if that person is doing things, excessively, that are detrimental to myself but my love will not falter or decrease. This even goes for people who want to live without me in their lives. I will be unhappy, crushed, that they feel the need to abandon, reject, or give me up but I want them to be happy with or without me. And I will not stand in the way.
11.) The Gift of True Friendship:
As stated above, even if I must distance myself permanently or temporarily, if someone is my friend, I will always be here as a friend or supporter if that person should need or want me. I may never hang out with or have deep conversations with that person again but I can still wish her the best. I will not reject a friend over disagreements or differences no matter what. I want to know the good and the bad, the happiness and the sadness in the person’s life. I want to write or talk, just to say hello some occasions, I want to see the person and bask in his/her successes and be a true listener and console during moments of stress or pain. I don’t want to be an “occasional” or “seasonal” friend who comes and goes or one who makes pathetic excuses to never hang out. True friends are interested in the good and the bad and will put things on hold now and then to tend to their friends when they need or want them most.
12.) The Gift of Full Forgiveness:
For both you and the other person, forgive. Let go. Even if feelings of resentment or anger reappear every now and then, in general it’s best to accept and move forward, or move on and forget and not let your body frequently fill with fury and negative energy. And not throw a mistake a friend made back into that person’s face again and again or during different arguments. A True, genuine, strong, positive, loving friendship is definitely worth forgiveness. You don’t have to always forgive everything and everyone but in general it’s probably best to try to let your body relax and ease up. This isn’t letting the person off the hook or get over on you. It’s quite the opposite. The person hurt you but no longer has power over you or your life. And if that person is a true friend and is genuinely interested in your welfare that person deserves forgiveness. And you deserve the liberty that your forgiveness will bring you.
13.) The Gift of appreciation and expression : There’s nothing better than knowing a person genuinely appreciates you and all you do. Let your friend, lover, kids, coworker, doctor, secretary, maybe even a stranger and anyone else you appreciate know just how grateful you are for that person’s presence in your life or how that person has touched you for the better. Tell them in person, send them an electronic message, a phone call, a card, or small gift, a hug, anything….just let the ones you appreciate know somehow! It will make them so thrilled!
14.) The Gift of inspiration: Be a positive, uplifting person. Speak positively of yourself and others and the life you are blessed to know. It’s uplifting and a good example to other people and will make you feel happier and uplifted too. Care for yourself and share your wisdom with others even though some people will not welcome it. Many will! This will inspire people around you to also love and care for themselves and others. If you come up with a great idea about anything or discover an inspirational quote or beautiful poem or photo, share it with people! Bring out the best in people. Smile. Make eye contact. Say hello. Be a blessing. Be a friend.
15.) The Gift of validation/letting others give to us: Let people think and feel how they do instead of trying to emotionally force them to believe other things. Let them express it. Your input is good but degrading, denying, and ridiculing people’s emotions is not good. If someone is in a bad mood, trying to cheer that person up is sweet but telling the person to “get over it” or that there’s nothing to be feeling low about or criticizing the person ‘s low mood is often detrimental, aggravating, and not helpful. You don’t have to lower your own mood to match theirs; you can find a good balance to console them. And when someone pays you a sincere compliment, even if you disagree or are very modest, it’s good to just be happy the person feels that way about you! Saying things like “that’s not true!” or “you’re just saying that. ” or “No I’m not that good looking or intelligent ” will just invalidate the person’s positive feelings about you and deny the person the positive emotions of complimenting you. That person wants you to feel happy and pleased and the person really feels that way about you whether or not you feel it about yourself and it’s not good to tell that person s/he is wrong. A true compliment is a gift to you, why throw it back in the person’s face?! Just a sweet & simple “thank you” is a great response!
16.) The Gift of your life: If the person is a true, trusted friend to you, share the good and the bad of your life and show genuine interest in the good and bad of that person’s. It’s not good to a person when you only want to vent or gossip and not tell your success and happy stories as well and if you have problems, big or small, a friend wants to know. So if you want to express them, don’t hold back! True friends are genuinely interested in the good and the bad. And it’s good to let your friends complain and vent to you about negative events in their lives and to take pleasure in their happiness. True friendship is about the good, the bad, everything….
“You’ve given me the best of you and now I need the rest of you.” ~ Billy Joel
17) The Gift of communication :
Tell your lover, family member, friend when that person is doing something to really affect you. If people are hurting you, they may not realize it or the extent of it. And it may not be intentional. They don’t always realize how much it impacts you. You can save a relationship or the quality of it by positively and effectively communicating. You can gently tell them that what they are doing is negatively affecting you and tell them you cherish your relationship with them and want to work on it for the better. And don’t just tell the bad things! Celebrate and acknowledge the good as well! Communication is very important in ANY kind of relationship!
These are just some things I find crucial to relationships of any kind and beautiful blessings to people. I believe they are good for people in general. And when you give these lovely gifts, you not only bless the person but you, yourself will be blessed. You may disagree with some of them or many of them. Or all of them?! ;-D Lol
My intention is NOT to tell people what they should do or have to do or to negatively judge people who do not do these things! I don’t always do all of them myself and I make mistakes but I try my best to frequently live this way and I truly believe these are great and priceless gifts to others. I don’t like to tell people how they should live or what they should do! Who am I to do that! I’m in no position for that! Of course I’m not! But I do love to provide suggestions in case they will help people and share what helps and inspires me. If someone is not inspired and does not want to take my suggestions, that’s ok! Whatever floats your boat! 😉
I wrote this some weeks ago and intended to post it here then never got around to it.
I tried posting it and it would not go through and then later I posted other stuff.
In January, 2008 I met a girl named Holly. In the extremely short amount of time we knew each other for, she impacted me in an incredibly positive way. I loved meeting Holly and will always be so very grateful our lives crossed and touched. Holly was/is one of the most beautiful, sweetest girls anyone could ever be blessed to know or meet.
But the circumstance in which we met was very, very unpleasant. We were both admitted to the same psychiatric hospital, her for Schizophrenia, me for severe depression. We shared a hospital room together.
It was my first hospitalization in that kind of hospital and I was unsure what to expect. I am extremely claustrophobic and have an immense fear of small and closed in places especially if I’m alone in them or with someone I cannot connect with for some reason.
This was my only fear about the hospital. I’m generally not a fearful kind of girl.
Even regular hospitals don’t scare me. I wasn’t even scared when I was about to have emergency kidney surgery when I was twenty one years old.
Just the anesthesia stuff scared me until the doc assured me that the Anesthesia would not paralyze me while I was conscious when I asked her. So it did not surprise me that I wasn’t scared of this hospital.
I was admitted to that hospital in the middle of the night, taken in an ambulance after leaving an emergency room at another hospital where I was for eight hours. When one of the friendly psychiatric technicians took me to my room, I was afraid. Afraid that he would lock the door and I would be locked in. I was starting to protest the fact that I had to go in that dark room. I started to get loud even though I am and always have been a very quiet girl in general. Other patients were sleeping, including my roommate, Holly. I told the technician I did not want to be locked in that room and he promised I wouldn’t be locked in there and he told me gently and warmly but firmly to be quiet so I would not wake Holly. I saw her laying in bed sleeping and as he was closing the door I turned around, pulled it all the way back opened and asked “Can she talk?”. I had no idea what was wrong with her or what state or condition she was in. She may have been in an immobilized depressive state, in a catatonic state like I am sometimes or she may have been suffering with Catatonic-type schizophrenia or some other condition that would render her unable to talk or connect with me on a level that would make me somewhat at ease being in a closed room with her. The technician smiled warmly with a quick laugh and said “Yes, she can talk.”. I instantly felt at ease and a bit calmer. He closed the door and I got into my bed next to her bed.
Words will never do justice to express the true depth of my loneliness or level of my suffering that day and the other days I have struggled with depression. The loneliness was so suffocating I felt that itself would kill me or drive me to insanity if I wasn’t already there. My depression often leaves me with a sense of loneliness so deep I feel that I am the only one in this world no matter how many people are near me and talking to me. And in a sense I am the only one in the world, my own solitary world of painful confinement. Like layers and layers just covering me and I cannot truly be touched in any way. Nothing can penetrate. There is no connection with anyone or anything. Sometimes when I am in a depression, it can be lifted by interacting with others, seeing friends, going out, doing things…but not always and this episode was one I thought nothing could touch.
But I am the kind of girl who is always thrilled to meet new people and even through my pain, despair, loneliness, and depression that day, deep inside me there was some small tinge of wonder about Holly, sparkling through my pain and despair. I wanted to meet her.
I wanted to wake her up, as tired and exhausted in every way imaginable that I was. I wanted to know her, I wanted her to know me.
I wanted her to break through my sheer walls that no one could see and ease the pain for at least a little while.
I instantly felt some sort of connection already as she laid there sound asleep.
We were both girls struggling, suffering with some wretched sickness that landed us in that hospital.
But I knew I couldn’t wake her. So I laid in my bed and eventually drifted off to sleep. Then before I knew it I was waking up to voices in the room with me. “Who’s that?” I heard a curious young woman’s voice ask. “That’s your new roommate, Kimberly.” I heard the technician answer.
We had to get our vital signs taken and get ready for breakfast. I finally got to meet her. She had the biggest, brightest smile that lit up the room.
She asked me what I was in there for and I told her depression. “What’s that?” She asked, “Is it like sadness?”. I was in no mood at all to explain what depression is or why I was so devastatingly depressed and I actually wasn’t sure exactly why anyway. I just knew it had something to do with “not having friends or a reason to live.” Even though I did have close friends. It felt as if I had no one.
“Yeah” I said, “Something like that.”. I was too lethargic to get out of bed and I laid back down.
Holly told me to get a lot of rest and I instantly sensed her caring, generous, beautiful nature.
I told her my intense fear of being in closed places and Holly was kind enough to open the door for me and she told me she doesn’t ever want me to be scared or sick. But it turned out that Holly was struggling with Paranoid Schizophrenia and was suffering with terrible hallucinations and delusions.
She saw things and heard things, often extremely unpleasant and terrifying things, that weren’t really there. And she was under the impression that people were trying to hurt her and get into her head and steal or mess with her thoughts.
She suddenly became terrified having the door open and the noises in the halls were affecting her negatively so she told me that she would close the door and that she was sorry for me and that it would all be ok because we would be together and she wouldn’t let anything bad happen to scare me.
I was no longer afraid of the door being closed.
Holly was in that hospital for a very long while and was in and out of hospitals for many years.
Holly made sure all the patients got what they wanted and needed. We were allowed to have hard candy throughout our stay there and when one girl did not get any candy and wanted some but was too afraid to ask, I could see that it actually hurt Holly to see that. Holly, an extremely empathetic person, wanted everyone to be happy. So she made sure the girl got her candy. She showed me pictures she made with toothpaste that she hung on the walls in our room.
Because of my depression I stayed in bed frequently so whenever the other patients were getting ready for a fun movie night or activity, Holly would come running to our room to let me know and make sure I was included. I was so accepted, so included, so pleased that she thought of me. ❤ And it actually lifted my depression. I felt joy in the things we did together.
One night I was extremely depressed and lonely and felt I was suffocating. I went to my room and laid in bed in so much pain I felt like I was dying. The loneliness was so immense I felt I could not go on living. I truly believed it would never end, never get better. My world was collapsed on top of me and I felt buried alive, crushed and so broken. I remembered year before, being excluded by friends and the pain was unbearable.
It was like an endless nightmare but I was awake.
It was Hell on Earth.
All of my flaws, real or imagined, magnified and came speeding at me with so much force, piercing my very essence.
I laid there alone with the lights off, endless thoughts swirling around in my head. Endless agonizing thoughts. Holly came into the room and turned the lights on.
She told me about a dream she recently had while she slept and I told her one of mine. I saw her eyes light up with amazement. She was so thrilled to hear my dream.
She was so genuinely interested in other people and the welfare of others.
So sensitive to everyone else’s needs and desires.
And we talked that night for hours in our beds about our pain and also about lighter topics. We talked about our joy, the happiness we felt when our illness would go away for a while. Girly things like body mist and lotion and Bath & Body Works, which we both love, and all the stuff we did for fun and all the stuff we dreamed of doing and wanting to want again if we weren’t so sick. The stuff we did, loved, before incredible sickness took over our worlds, ravaged our brains.
For a few moments we were just two ordinary girls having a fun “sleep over.” Chatting and giggling, the way girls are supposed to be, not stuck in hospital beds wanting so desperately to die.
I actually smiled and even laughed, joyfully, and for once in seemingly so so long, I felt a deeper connection to someone, her.
And she was telling me of something funny that happened with one of the other patients and I told her about how hilarious it was when a boy with a spiral notebook that was his journal got it and his pen taken away and the pen replaced with a pencil and the sharp metal spiral thing removed out of the pages and then he got it back.
It was falling apart now.
I still laugh at that when I think back to those days. And even through the painful memories I can feel amusement and light.
🙂 😀
We laughed hysterically over the silliness we felt and how they took away our clothes and things and our shoelaces and belts and anything else that may be a potential weapon against ourselves or others.
Replacing everything potentially dangerous with safer things. Pencils as opposed to pens, smaller towels, plastic forks & spoons, all the strings and laces in clothing, and wiring in girls’ bras, all taken away.
Suddenly for a few minutes our pain that brought so much devastation and grief and the seriousness of being in a psychiatric hospital turned into
Something funny. We made fun of ourselves instead of dwelling on the seriousness and darkness of our circumstance. How crazy we are, we told each other, being dragged into a mental institution in the middle of the night. Getting all of our things taken away.
Holly told me she hears voices no one else can hear and people just call her crazy.
“I know” I told her. “I hear them too.”
She told me how much it hurt her. I know. It hurts me too.
I have also met other amazing people in that hospital those days. ❤
Michelle. Melissa. Lamont. Latrina. Kelly. Chris. Gina. Frank. Patricia. Aquanetta. And many, many more.
Yesterday and the day before were kind of sad days for me for a reason I know not what. Yesterday I felt much sadness for no known reason and then I have been struggling with a loneliness so deep, deeper than I have felt in so so long. The kind of loneliness that even great company cannot cure. It’s not as bad as it was then. And there’s another difference. I am stronger now. And I know this pain and loneliness are only temporary.
I know this pain. I know it well.
It will come and it will go. I now know that I can live. I did not know then what I know now.
I will always think of and remember Holly and the others. I haven’t seen her since I left the hospital. I know nothing of her now other than what I knew then. I have been thinking of her and the rest a lot yesterday. How they inspired me so deeply and let me see hope and light through so much darkness.
If I can laugh with a girl while we sit in our hospital beds being accused of being “crazy” hearing crazy voices, having disturbing thoughts, being locked away, I can sure sit here and laugh now! 😀
I am in a much, much better place. What a great accomplishment. Being able to be strong enough and knowledgeable enough to not let my mood sink deeper into the depression I was living then.
The depressive episodes are so much easier to handle now. And less frequent and less depression in the middle.
It’s strange but in a beautiful way. Weird to feel the same old pain sometimes but still be able to stay positive to a certain degree and even feel a shred of happiness amidst the pain and not want to die. Sometimes, even back then, I felt happy with the pain but even more now.
Before, sometimes even beneath the happiness I still felt a kind of lingering sadness, not always but on occasion. Now even through the sadness I still feel a kind of happiness more than before.
So beautifully strange. It feels weird but beautiful to live voluntarily and not just because I have to or out of fear. There have always been days/weeks/months, during my years of frequent depression, I truly wanted to live and was genuinely happy but then the depression would come back and stay a while and take my will to live. Sometimes for months. Then when I would be happy again, it felt strange and beautiful.
I will healthily mourn all my days/years lost to pain, while celebrating all the days it would lift and I would be happy, and I will move on and embrace the now I am blessed to know.
❤ </3
Wherever Holly is, I hope she is well and this goes for everyone else too. I hope everyone who is at a low point can find some consolation, hope, beauty, & light. Remember when you’re at your lowest point, the only way is up! 🙂
“Bless the broken road that led me straight to you.” ❤
“I may be lonely but I’m never alone.” ~Alice Cooper ❤
A Dose of Inspiration 