I don’t know how to hide my emotions. Never have.
If I’m happy, there’ll be a lightness to me you can almost touch. If I’m sad, I’ll cry, even in the middle of a smile. My mother jokes that my tear ducts are far too close to my actual eyes. Sometimes I wonder what it says about me, this crying. I have been told it makes me look like a victim. I am decidedly not a victim. If anything, I suspect I am the villain in some people’s stories. And sometimes I think, for someone who fights demons in her own head daily, when exactly would she find the time to be a villain?
But maybe that’s the point. Maybe I don’t know myself as well as I think I do.
I was diagnosed with limerance by a TikTok therapist. I was amused, of course. I had been on one of those mindless scrolling spirals when video after video landed on something that felt uncomfortably familiar. The obsessive attachment. The belief in the best of people, long past the point where evidence supports it. The chances given over and over and over again to people who have treated them, and me, like a bottomless well. Take, take, take. And I keep saying, ‘Here, there’s more.’
My therapist told me to manage my expectations. What she didn’t say, and what I am only now beginning to understand, is that I am also part of this equation. My willingness to be blind is not a virtue, it is a choice. And choices have consequences.
My father used to say love is the measure to which you are willing to be inconvenienced. The Bible says, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ I have spent my whole life reading both of those things as instructions to pour outward. But the uncomfortable second clause of the Bible verse sits there, quietly waiting for you to notice it: As yourself. What does it mean to love something you are still learning to consider?
This is the unfettered truth I’ve been circling. I find it self-indulgent to consider my own feelings. Even as I write this, some part of me wants to apologise for taking up this much space. But if I don’t consider my feelings, who will? Who else can I trust to protect me? Even from myself sometimes?
Limerance.
I think it started somewhere early. In the grief. In the loss of people I loved, taken too soon. My parents. My siblings. When everyone around you seems to leave, you learn to grip the ones who stay with both hands, even when your grip becomes the very thing that does the damage. Even when you know – you know – that you should let go.
So yes. I am also the villain in this story sometimes.
We are, all of us, capable of great good and great bad. We contain multitudes. We are Narcissus, gazing at our own reflection, convinced we are only ever the wronged party. We punish people who don’t even know they’ve offended us. We hold impossibly high standards for everyone except ourselves, and then hide behind I’m only human when we are the ones doing the hurting.
I have done this. I am not exempt from this.
To anyone I may have hurt while I was too busy studying my own reflection for flaws, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for not living up to the image you had of me, and perhaps more honestly, for the ways I failed the image I had of myself.
I think I am slowly learning, sometimes painfully, that loving yourself is not a selfish act. It is, in fact, the foundation. You cannot love your neighbour properly from an empty house. You cannot give from a well you have never thought to tend.
So, this is me, tending the well or at least trying. You are now, whether you signed up for it or not, part of my therapy journey. We are asking the hard questions here, and we are not promised immediate answers, but we are asking.
Limerance.
How do I heal that little girl who is holding on to people because letting go means loss, and loss means grief, and grief means that it had all been real?
I don’t know yet. But I think asking and asking is where it starts.