We might often ask ourselves what defines love and why do we feel so empty without it? It is human nature to have the desire to be loved. Sometimes a person just wants to feel needed by someone. No matter what the reasons are, it is human nature that love is something that people desire. Think back to when you were a young child, watching romantic movies at home on your couch, thinking “I wonder if this will be me one day.” I think love is experienced differently through various stages of life. We experience different types of love as children, adolescence, and as adults. We love our parents, siblings, friends, family, pets, first boyfriend/girlfriend, spouse, and children. We might give love, but we need to receive love too. To feel needed, to feel accepted, to feel understood are things most people require for fulfillment.

As children, emotional development is just as important as physical development. I am a firm believer that events that happen in childhood affect development and can later affect a person’s adult life. I’ve struggled most of my life feeling like I am not capable of loving someone in a healthy way. I have had many unstable relationships in my life and I take a large part of the blame for that. I spent a lot of time searching for someone to give me the love I felt like I was missing. I pushed a lot of people away in the process. To be a young child, to struggle internally, sometimes all you want is for someone to actually take interest and ask you: “are you okay?” “What’s wrong, and how can I help?” My grandmother was my confidant, and as she got sick, I had to emotionally detach myself, because I knew once she was gone I would be alone. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why I felt so inadequate to everyone around me. Even during the times I was surrounded by people, I still felt so alone. I felt like I could not talk about the things I was experiencing due to fear of experiencing emotional invalidation. I will clarify, my physical needs were met as a child, I had nice clothing, a roof over my head, running water, food, a good education, and more.

I spent a lot of my time in my own little world as a child, but that’s okay because they liked me there. It was a my escape from reality, my escape from my feelings. I felt accepted, understood, and powerful. My own little world was a cool fantasy place, it was a place where I was the person I wanted to be, with the life I wished I could have. I would walk around my neighborhood, daydreaming about the future a lot of time when I was not at school. When I was young, I dreamed of the day I would be a smart, powerful lawyer who lived in an overpriced apartment NYC, and nothing was going to get in my way. I dreamed of ways to change the world, and how one small town kid could make a difference as an adult. Once it got dark outside, I would come inside, because I did not like walking at night. When I was home, I let out a lot of my stress and emotions through dance. My little secret is that I spent almost all of my childhood choreographing dance routines in my living room. You could almost always find me listening to all of my favorite music that I illegally downloaded from LimeWire on our early 2000s desktop computer speakers. I was too shy and insecure to ever want to join a dance team or cheer team because I was not flexible enough to do any tumbling. I enjoyed dancing on my own, I got to release my emotions and didn’t feel the pressure of learning new routines at a pace I could not keep up with.

I spent a lot of my adolescence and early adulthood being angry, because I felt like I was an emotional train wreck without any emotional support. The person I was most angry with was my mom. I was determined that I would never let her forget how I felt like she was more of a bank than a mom, and that she missed out on so much of my life because she had slept almost every evening away. I threw low shots at her when we would fight, discrediting everything good that she did do. As a hurt child, teenager and even a young adult, I was not fully capable of understanding the big picture. Now that I’m older I look at it so differently. Maybe my mom was emotionally unavailable because she was struggling with something on her own. Maybe my mom was depressed, which caused her to sleep and it was not actually because she did not love her children. Maybe my mom was just a tired, working single mom who felt inadequate because her daughter was an emotional rollercoaster, and she didn’t know how to help her. Maybe my mom was weak at the time, and easily persuaded because she felt like she could not handle everything on her own. My mom and I spent the majority of my life without a good, solid healthy relationship. I am blessed that now her and I get along very well and she is my best friend. I learned how to let things go, to forgive and forget. Holding a grudge against my mom for not always being emotionally there for me would only do me a disservice. I refuse to spend the rest of my time alive with her alive as well being angry with her. I only get one mom, and I don’t want to regret wasting away our entire relationship because of anger.

As I have gotten older, I have discovered that I am more like my mother than I thought I would be. She is strong, caring, compassionate, resilient, silly, honest, and selfless. I would be lucky to be anything like my mother. To my mom, who I know is reading this right now, I’m sorry for the things I said when I was angry, when I was young, and when I was incapable of understanding things the way I do now. I only hope and aspire to be at least half the human that you are in this life. Just know that I love and appreciate you and I feel very blessed to have you as my mom and also my best friend.

As an adult, I still struggle with emotional detachment issues and difficulty regulating my emotions. I let my emotions take over more than I really want to, especially when I feel like I am being attacked. I struggle giving love, feeling love, and receiving love. I struggle with friendships, and purposely isolate myself even when I think I need to stop doing that. I struggle with finding the value of family because I always felt disconnected from my family my entire life. These are things I am actively working through, but everything takes time. I have found that opening up and accepting these flaws will only help me work through them. There is more to my story, leading me into this emotional detachment and dysregulation I struggle with. There are parts of my story that I have recently been trying to recollect memory of, because I spent a lot of time trying to intentionally forget these things. I wanted to prevent from having anger and resentment towards any of those who have hurt me in the past. I do not hold grudges against anyone, and I’ve become more comfortable talking about it. I’ll write more about these things in a later post once I get my thoughts in order. But for now, I will leave this here with only a small start. If you, or someone you are close with is struggling with emotional detachment, or dysregulation, reach out for help. Read about it. Try to understand it. Admitting that something is wrong is hard, but it is the first step towards healing. As said earlier, good things take time. Healing takes time. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day and have a good week!

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