Dear Digital Diary

Dear Digital Diary,

I am my own worst enemy.

As the eldest daughter, I assumed I was just “independent”. I walked away when people seemed upset at me, when I’d done something wrong, or felt emotionally vulnerable. I’d go into my room, more specifically, into my closet, where I’d write songs about troubled girls and broken hearts. I was self-regulating and putting my emotions into something that showed proof. Then I’d act like nothing had happened.

My sister cried more than I did as a child. I was often angry, often throwing tantrums. Anger was my first response to sadness. Anger, as it seems, is easier to process. You get mad, you throw something, you run it off, it’s done. Sadness has more stages and is trickier to process.

So after my first broken heart, freshly sixteen, I turned my sadness of not feeling like enough into anger that I even let him make me think that in the first place. It was ego above all else. A thought that, if I could rise above it, it would always be his loss. That I couldn’t be hurt by any of it. Self-regulating became self-preservation.

And I went to great lengths to self-preserve. I chose men who seemed unattainable and who wouldn’t emotionally connect with me, because then I couldn’t connect with them either. I chose the men whom I almost hated because if I hated them already, they couldn’t hurt me.

Toxic behavior, I know.

But then you’re twenty, and you realize how long you’ve been alone. I got a therapist then, and she helped me understand why I’m so quick to detach and why I would leave the second things in a relationship felt good, and why I always ghost my friends when my life gets overwhelming. She tells me I have avoidant attachment. And that it stems from childhood. And although it’s not my fault, it’s now my issue to deal with and work through if I want my life and relationships to change for the better.

According to Google, those with avoidant attachment style share some core characteristics:

• Difficulty with emotional vulnerability, physical affection, and/or expressing their needs
• Difficulty trusting others
• Withdrawal during conflict
• Emotional unavailability
• Fear of abandonment
• Prioritizing self-sufficiency

The problem with this attachment style is that it’s a silent killer. Everybody will pick up on it but you. And it wasn’t until I began to recover that I realized when I was doing it. Fear of intimacy? Avoidant. Can’t say I love you? Avoidant. Ghosting my friends when I’m overwhelmed? Avoidant. People calling me selfish for canceling plans? Avoidant!

There’s a theme there. And I had no idea until I found someone I really wanted to be with. It was at that point that I realized that it was my choice to make whether or not I wanted to take my therapist’s advice and understand my triggers to better help my reactions to situations. There were some relationships in which I wasn’t willing to change and do that work. I look back and only regret some of them, because I can now see how I self-sabotaged, hurting myself and the other person.

But that’s just the thing, you can’t fix someone who’s avoiding you. You have to give them the space to process what’s happening, and only then may they choose to understand their actions, their triggers, and what feels safe. If you chase something that’s already running, there’s a high chance they’ll only run faster.

You can’t force-feed an avoidant medicine. They’ve got to come across it themselves and choose to try and get well again. But I will say that this doesn’t make an avoidant person heartless. Take it from a recovering avoidant: the avoidant feels as much as someone who isn’t suffering the same symptoms. But sometimes the intensity of the feelings scares them, and they deem it unsafe.

And sometimes, one day, they’ll wake up and realize that love, although scary, requires vulnerability. It requires the risk of it being lost. That’s what makes it real and important.