The Curse of Subjectivity

I am no stranger to people walking out of my life. In my twenty-two years, I’ve lost countless individuals, and those who used to be significant have become distant memories. As they leave, I find myself obsessing over why they left. What did I do wrong? What stories will they tell about me as their life progresses? No matter how much I fixate on it I will never know. Subjective experience is tricky like that.

In November of 2015, I ended a three-year relationship with my college boyfriend. Recovery from this traumatic experience was easy; I knew almost immediately that I was better off without him. Since then I have moved on and replaced the empty void he left with newfound passions and healthy relationships. Yet some memories still hurt. Our happy memories together have been clouded with anger as I think about his current relationship with my ex-roommate. (Pretty fucked up, I know.)

I keep having this dream where I’m with Mary and Michael. She’s showing me pictures of them together and he looks happy. A real smile, laughing. Something I never really saw. In my dream, she looks at me and says, “Look how happy he is! He never smiled like this when he was with you.” I wake up sweating and my heart pounding. This dreadful expression of my subconscious sets the tone for the rest of my day.

“Why do you do this, brain?” I say to myself incredulously as I am speeding down the highway. Frustrated, I turn on the radio and, as if the universe is out to get me, our song comes on. I feel his hand on my leg, but when I look to the passenger seat he’s not there. I feel a pang in my stomach when it hits me. The blood drains from my face and the fixation of our failed relationship takes over. Our relationship was emotionally abusive, and yet I find myself questioning the truth in that. I walked away damaged, with no self-worth, but did he? In my story, I’ve romanticized him to be the villain. He was apathetic, unavailable, manipulative. Am I the antagonist in his story? Have I become the abuser who twisted him into an empty shell of a person? I turn the music in my car up louder, drowning out my anxiety.

My mind goes back to our last conversations. I thought I had tried my best to maintain my anger at the time. But it’s hard to mask the total betrayal from him and someone I thought was my friend. Alone in my car, I wonder if my dream was truly reality. Realizing that I will never know how he really felt about me, while we were dating to almost a year since our break up, disintegrates my confidence as a girlfriend. It destroys me to even consider the fact that he might be happier without me (even though I sure as hell am happier without him). Rationally I know that sooner or later it’s going to happen. Sooner or later we will both move on.

Michael has made me question my competence to be a good girlfriend, but I’ve lost friends who leave me breathless and questioning my worth in other ways. Some of these so-called friends walk out of my life with an explanation and some leave me guessing. My best friends who comfort me through these desertions constantly reassure me that I’m one of the best friends they’ve ever had, and being deeply invested in their emotional wellbeing is a treasured part of my personality. A quality I’ve always been proud of, however, it’s often the breaking point for the people who have walked out on me. I’ve been told that being my friend is too overwhelming and it’s too much for them to handle.

I fixate on this phrase, distorting it more and more. Too much to handle, I am too much to handle; my worth is defined by my ability to be handled by the people I care about. A person is not around to be handled. You “handle” situations. A person has more worth than pacifying a crisis. When I am deemed too much to handle, I become less than a person. I am an object, a chore.

I met Nicole when she did a story for my university’s TV station on me and my dog. After the interview, we talked and joked in the courtyard until the street lamps flickered on and the sun disappeared. Our relationship rapidly developed from that moment on. We talked every day and spent nights on the beach drinking. Even when I moved back to Colorado she came to visit me three times and was planning to move in with me.

Now with 2,000 miles between us, the communication dwindled. We usually texted every other day or so, but for a few weeks, I didn’t hear from her once. I had texted her here and there and tried to call, never hearing anything back. Finally, I sent her one final message about how hurt I was that she had abandoned me, and I began removing her from every aspect of my life. She never reached out to me or responded.

Months later I still wonder what I did wrong. I put my trust in Nicole. I made myself emotionally vulnerable to form a connection and she disappeared. What had I done wrong to drive her away?

Even though our friendship only lasted a year, in that time I considered Nicole to be one of my best friends. Categorized in my brain with the friends I’ve known for a decade, after only one year she was in the best friends club. She was my best friend. To her, I was a miniscule part of her life that apparently meant nothing. In the future, she might she’ll tell stories about this girl she got trashed on the beach with or took her to Breckenridge for a weekend, or maybe she’ll forget about me entirely.

After Michael, I met Eddie. We met in a bar in San Francisco while I was visiting a friend out there and we instantly hit it off. Like Nicole, our relationship blossomed quickly. I found myself falling in love with him only after a few months. He hosted a radio show where he lived at the time, and one day when I listened in, he did a shout out to me and played my favorite song at the time.

He made me feel special, like I was the coolest person he’d ever met. And he seemed to be everything I needed: loving, attentive, intelligent, and emotionally available. He took a genuine interest in my life and boosted my confidence. We’d talk on the phone and he cared about my dumb stories, even the ones I told over and over. I felt more secure in my girlfriend-hood with Eddie.

Until one day I was wrong. Out of nowhere, I found that he had blocked my number and blocked me on all forms of social media. He left me no explanation whatsoever and totally heartbroken. I tried to call him, text him, and I even emailed him. No response. What had I done wrong? Was I too overwhelming for him? I truly thought I had found someone who was different than most of the people in my life and was going to love me wholeheartedly. Lying in bed at night I recount the conversations we had; maybe I missed some sign from him or was too infatuated to notice it right in front of me. I was in love with this man. He was a part of my future, but I was not a part of his.

With the frustrating end to each of these relationships, I fixate on my flaws that ultimately drove them away. Trying to pick apart pieces of my personality that were too much to “handle.” Was it my laugh? Or maybe I posted too many things on their Facebook? Did I overstep a boundary without even knowing?

Throughout most of my life, numerous people I care about eventually walked out on me. To ease the betrayal and anger, I tell myself that it says more about them than it does about me. They felt overwhelmed by me. They didn’t like me as a person. They had their own issues that interfered with my friendship. They. They. They. Not me. Them. I was not going to change who I was, and if they didn’t want to be my friend that was their choice. That was okay. Not everybody has to like me all the time.

I ground myself into this thought process, convincing myself that it was not my fault that people left me. The underlying issue is never that people leave. It is not even that people cannot “handle” me. I fixate and obsess over the stories other people will tell about me in the years to come. Who will I be to them in five years? Ten? No matter how badly it burned to have Eddie or Nicole walk out of my life, I crave solace knowing that I was never the villain in their story.

Many of these people never deserved my love and friendship, however, I still gave it to them hoping they would see the good in me. No matter how our story ended I always wanted to be the hero, the comforting companion, or the loyal lover. The fact of the matter is that I will never know. I will never know who I am to them, but will they know who they were to me?

As I have overcome each person’s departure, I have accepted my subjectivity. My consciousness is the only consciousness I will ever have control over, no matter how intently I test out my telepathic powers. I could waste my energy focusing on how they perceive me.

I want Michael to see me as the girl who got away. He wanted me back even if he didn’t know it yet, and my final moment was going to be denying his affection to show him that I have moved on. I could spend my nights dissecting every moment with Eddie over and over until I can no longer tell the difference between what is real and what is my imagination. I could imagine disaster scenarios that cause harm to the people that have hurt me. I could do all those things, and to an extent I have. But harboring all this anger towards people I have no control over causes more harm than good. The problem is not how they feel about me; it is how I feel about myself.

Putting myself back together after the end of some relationships has always been a challenge. But it gets a little easier each time. My anger subsides as I write about the people who caused it. I realize that regardless of how I want them to feel about me, it ultimately doesn’t matter. They are not responsible for repairing my self-worth; I am. As easy as it would be for me to drown in the reasons why they left, I cannot do that. I must look inward at my subjective experience and put back together the parts of me that I love.

I love how devoted I am to my friends. I love being an active part of the lives of those I care about. I love being my best friend’s biggest cheerleader because they deserve all this world has to offer. I love loving the people I love. And slowly but surely, I am starting to love myself, objectively.