“Why do I and everyone I love pick people who treat us like we're nothing?”
“We accept the love we think we deserve.”
The Perks of Being A Wallflower
A lot has been said about love in movies, novels, personal experiences and even mythology. But, do we know what love actually is? Is it a subconscious, involuntary attraction to someone, inexplicable, purely from the soul? Or is it just a chemical reaction as Sherlock says “Sentiment is a chemical defect…....your pulse: elevated; your pupils: dilated. I imagine John Watson thinks love's a mystery to me, but the chemistry is incredibly simple and very destructive.”
Whatever love is, it surely is the strongest feeling and something all humans strive for in all its forms - love of parents, love of friends, love of a special someone, love of self. We all want to take some of it and give back some of it. One of the translations I recently learnt in my Spanish lesson was “Es importante poder amar: It’s important to be able to love.” If love is such an important emotion, then why is it scarce? Why is love not omnipresent, in all its forms? Or maybe it is, and we sometimes just fail to feel it?
As an anxious person, I question the concept of love every day. I sometimes feel that people love you out of habit (like if they have known you for 15 years), out of obligation or simply because you were born in the family. After these filters, one can list very few names of people who they think love them. I used to believe as a teenager that love is constant (thank you, unrealistic movies and novels). That once you develop “love” towards someone, be it any form of love, it is there to stay. A naïve assumption, I know now. For all it matters, love is in reality not a constant emotion. Like any other emotion it can change, both in quantity and quality. Sometimes people love you like you are their world, other times they stop loving you like you mean nothing to them, people’s perception towards you changes, people change, people leave you, people “move on” and find new people to love. Another major realisation I had about love is that people will love you as long as they want to, not as long as you want them to. Obviously, this applies to cases where the leaving is voluntary. Involuntary cases are a little easier to understand, if not easier to move on.
Now, according to what I have understood after a lot of soul-searching is that anxiety mixed with the realities of love makes it very difficult for us. The anxiety package already includes low self-image, low self-esteem and a forever questioned sense of self-worth. There is a scene in the movie “Barfi”(...another Ranbir Kapoor starrer, and a very heart touching film with amaaaaziingggggggg music) where Barfi takes a “trust test” of all his friends. He gets drunk and cuts a wooden pole in half and lets it fall. He stands with his friend just a few millimeters away from the exact spot the pole will fall. And then he waits to see if when the pole falls, his friend leaves his side or not. A simple test. But a very strong metaphor. If someone truly loves you, they will not leave your side no matter what happens. Sometimes we have been hurt so many times that it becomes very difficult for us to trust people with ourselves. We are people who carry their heart and soul on their sleeve, in easy reach for others to break. So, sometimes, we also end up “testing” our loved ones. Not in a toxic way, of that I am sure. We keep the test to ourselves and use it to reassure ourselves that they still love us. Sometimes we may need to ask them directly, but that happens usually when we are on the brink of a panic attack, that is when the storm inside us has already been built up.
What do we do to check that the people you know or expect to love you, still love you? We mostly have a checklist in our minds for usual and unusual behaviors. If any person’s behavior is a little off from their usual behavior, the alarm goes off. As a result, I end up spending the major part of my day reassuring myself that all people around me still “love” me and won’t leave me. I try really hard sometimes to reassure myself that I too deserve love and my people will not run away, no matter how bad a panic attack I have. For instance, if I consider ten people as “my people” then every day I end up doing all the permutation combinations in my head to make sure that these ten are still there and that we are doing okay. If I feel that any combination does not fit, or any circuit is incomplete, BAM! Short circuit and the fuse trips. It may not necessarily be a full-fledged panic attack, but it does trigger some negative emotions, self-doubts and overthinking.
Maybe I seem like an emotionally high maintenance maniac, but I like to think it’s because of some part of my personality that was shaped in my early years. It’s not like I enjoy being a tough person to handle, or being a social pariah, or dwelling in self-pity, or fighting with people over small things they were expected to do for me. Of course it makes me feel bad and guilty. But, over the years some incidents have taken place, someone has been unkind to me or someone did not have enough patience towards me which in accumulation means that now I need to “test” people.
The bottom line is “I am scared that once I begin to trust someone or let a person in, he or she will leave me”. Funnily, this fear has been true almost 90% of my life (that is 90% of 26 yrs - 23.4 yrs). 23.4 years of my life spent in the same cycle (Oh god, I did not think it would be this shocking when quantified). Every time it is proven to be true, the intensity only increases in the next cycle. Can you imagine how exhausting and hurtful it is?
Next, I think I should also talk a little about self-love. As I said earlier, the anxiety-package brings in it low self-image, low self-esteem and sense of no self-worth. This often makes us see ourselves from the eyes of others, because we are obviously not the best people to judge ourselves (Order, order: self-pity). The sense of love for ourselves then is directly proportional to the love others have for us.
Love for ourselves ∝ Others’ love for us
This is the MOST MOST MOST (I cannot stress enough on this) dangerous law of anxiety.
The answer to the question “do THEY love me?” also answers the question “Do I love MYSELF?”. No wonder then that a life of anxiety is a constant struggle between “they love me”, “they love me not”, “I love me”, “I love me not”. Practically like a love-sick person with a flower in hand, removing the petals one by one and checking the odds.
Now when I think about it, we waste so many flowers, time and energy in this. If we start doing this for every family member, every friend and literally every person we meet, we would practically uproot an entire garden (which must have been really beautiful). Now when you apply the same logic to life: We waste a lot of days/hours/minutes/seconds thinking about whether others love us or not. We uproot our entire existence and give it to them and let them play the odds with us. Thus, destroying the entire garden of awesome-ness within us.
I know, anxiety makes it very difficult to love yourself, but the least we can do is take care of ourselves and let ourselves bloom.
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