Hard to love. in Mental Health

I was told that many times, by many men. I am hard to love. I believed that for a long time. Hell, I think a part of me still believes it. All the time, I think to myself, “Don’t do that, you’ll be annoying.” Don’t do that, don’t say that, don’t express that emotion, thought, or fear. Don’t be real because it will just make you harder to love. It will cause you to be viewed as needy or clingy or too demanding of time and attention, too insecure, too weak.

Reaching out for me is almost impossible. I can’t just call up a friend and say, “I need you.” Oh gawd, no. I’m not allowed to need anyone. After all, everything I’ve accomplished, I’ve accomplished on my own. I’ve raised children and my credit score all by myself. I was taught by those men that needing them, needing help, was pointless. Asking for help was so hard and, when I did, well… They weren’t going to give in, give me what I needed, because that was just an annoyance, an inconvenience. Why was I being so demanding, so needy, so emotional? Jeez, how annoying. I couldn’t just break down and cry and express my feelings and fears, my thoughts and desires, oh no. That would just lessen me in their eyes, make them pity me, or make them angry because I was being “overly emotional” or “irrational.” Like, feelings aren’t always rational, you know? And when you’ve got 76 different mental illnesses, emotions are rarely rational. And when you’re in the deep, in the really deep, dark place of mental illness, well… You already know that you’re garbage and that no one even likes you, much less loves you. All you can see in yourself is all the bad things, the pain and fear and insecurity. The thoughts just come. “I’d be better off dead.” “The world wouldn’t miss me.” Bullshit thoughts, completely untrue and irrational. You can’t express those thoughts, no. They’ll just scoff and tell you that you’re being ridiculous. Sometimes they’ll laugh. Sometimes they’ll yell.

I have so many memories of these things. Different times, different men, but all just terrible. I was treated like so much trash for so long that I think sometimes I have no idea how to be loved. The concept of being loved is foreign to me. Being loved, desired, cared for… I feel like a stranger in a strange land. I feel outside myself. Because, to the me inside, none of this is real. It can’t possibly be. It’s so shocking to my system, so alien, that all I can do is watch from the outside while the me inside just shakes her head in disbelief. Because I’ve believed before, you know. That I was loved. I was convinced before, by those men. And I don’t know how to stop waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I can’t reconcile that feeling with what I know of you, of us, and of this love. But still, the me inside is convinced. There is another shoe and it will certainly drop eventually and then…

And the me on the outside is thinking, “So fucking what? There’s always a shoe and it always drops and you always kick it out of the way and walk on by.”

But you and the way you love me… like I’m not hard to love at all. And loving you feels like my heartbeat, just a fact of biology. Being with you feels like being right where I belong. The way you love me is just so astounding, almost unbelievable. But I believe it and that terrifies the inner me. When a thing has been a pattern for so long in a life, it can be really hard to see it outside of the pattern, apart from the pattern. It’s hard to see a break in the pattern. It’s hard to believe there could be a break in the pattern. And yet, you just keep breaking it every day, over and over, showing me that maybe, just maybe, there could be a new pattern to my life. A good, healthy, stable pattern. And then maybe the scared little inner me could stop feeling afraid.

Maybe she can be convinced that she is not hard to love after all.

Last updated February 09, 2020