353. how i show up

I’ve been in relationships for most of my life, or at least moving toward them. I enjoy companionship. I like sharing space, sharing days, sharing the small moments that make life feel ordinary. In practice though, I spend most of my time alone. When I’m not in a relationship, my life contracts. I don’t have a wide social circle. I don’t spread myself out across friendships, routines, or communities. I move through my days quietly, waiting. Solitude is familiar to me, but it has never felt like home.

When I do find someone I can center my life around, everything consolidates. That person becomes my world. Friend, lover, confidant, emotional anchor. I don’t feel lonely then, even if from the outside it might look like my life has narrowed. With my person, I feel safe. Life makes sense. I have direction. Without them, I feel untethered, not because I don’t know how to be alone in a literal sense, but because aloneness has never felt like a place where I fully belong, even though I spend so much of my time there.

When I am in a committed relationship, I don’t necessarily feel more like myself in someone’s presence, but I feel accepted. I feel allowed to exist without bracing. And if I’m honest, I don’t just wake up in that presence. I slowly disappear into it. Not intentionally, not in a way that feels dramatic at the time, but through a quiet drift. Feeling seen is the deepest form of relief I know. When someone reflects me back to myself, when my presence is noticed and responded to, the attachment deepens. Over time, I start placing more and more of myself there, until their attention becomes the place where I locate my sense of being real.

Over time, I’ve started to notice that my sense of self has never lived entirely inside me. That doesn’t mean I lack an inner world, personal values, or interests of my own. I do. Parts of me feel alive in isolation. But life itself feels hollow when it isn’t shared with someone. The parts of me that feel most coherent, most grounded, most oriented don’t stay fully accessible on their own. They tend to come online in the presence of another person.

When there is mutual attention, curiosity, and responsiveness, something in me settles into place. I don’t have to search for myself. I don’t have to perform. I feel alive without effort. Oriented. There’s a felt sense that I’m landing somewhere, that my presence is registering. I don’t just understand that I matter. I feel it in my body. And when that mirror disappears, it isn’t that everything goes quiet. It’s that something essential slips out of reach. The loss isn’t only of the person. It’s the loss of access to myself.

This way of being is often misunderstood. In a culture that treats self-sufficiency as maturity, it can look like dependence from the outside. From the inside, it feels less like neediness and more like regulation. My nervous system settles through emotional presence, choice, and reciprocity. When those are there, my body relaxes. When they’re gone, the absence doesn’t register as ordinary sadness. It feels like threat. Not dramatic threat, but something physical and disorganizing. The kind that makes it hard to care about things that once felt important. It isn’t that I suddenly stop valuing certain things. It’s that without grounding, they lose their magnetism. I feel unanchored, and without that footing, I don’t know how to stay engaged.

When access to myself can vanish that completely, the risk becomes impossible to ignore. Over time, I started trying to outrun the pain that came every time connection disappeared. If being chosen felt like safety, then the obvious solution was to become as un-leavable as possible. Self-improvement, discipline, emotional insight, generosity, competence, fitness. These weren’t aesthetic pursuits or ego projects. They were attempts to stabilize connection. If I could become undeniably great, maybe the ground wouldn’t drop out from under me again. If I could remove reasons someone might leave, perhaps connection would finally last.

And in some ways, this worked. I’ve become very good at attracting people. I know how to show up. I know how to listen, to care, to be present. Where things tend to fall apart is not at the beginning, but later, when safety settles in. I lose a part of myself inside the security of another, not because I stop caring or stop trying, but because I don’t actually know how to grow with someone once safety is established. I know how to become better for myself. I don’t know how to integrate that growth into a shared life. When I struggle, the other person often leaves rather than staying long enough for us to figure out a way through it together, and while I understand that it isn’t anyone’s responsibility to save me, it still hurts. Often, it’s devastating. My attachment bond runs deep. Deeper than anything I’ve experienced mirrored back. I would do almost anything to help the person I love through a challenging moment, and I keep hoping to find someone whose bond runs just as deep. The problem is, you don’t find that out until you’re already in it, no matter how well you show up at the start.

The strategy of becoming exceptional works until it collides with reality. No amount of excellence can override incompatibility, values, or another person’s limits. And when a relationship ends for those reasons, my system doesn’t experience it as a neutral mismatch. It experiences it as failure. Not because that interpretation is necessarily accurate, but because when safety is tied to being chosen, loss gets translated into inadequacy whether it belongs there or not.

What makes this especially destabilizing is that my identity itself is relational. When I’m with someone, I feel alive, capable, generous, and grounded. There is structure, orientation, an emotional gravity that pulls everything into alignment. When that bond disappears, the collapse isn’t gradual. It’s abrupt and total. The scaffolding goes all at once. Not just the relationship, but the role I was inhabiting, the feedback loop that quietly said: "I exist, I matter, I’m good." Endings don’t feel merely sad. They feel existential, because I’m not only grieving someone else. I’m grieving access to the version of myself that felt most alive, the version that laughed more easily, moved more freely, and felt more free to walk through the world.

This pattern shows up in how I relate to intimacy and meaning as well. My attraction to being deeply attuned to another person’s experience, to finding purpose in responsiveness, trust, and connectedness, isn’t incidental. It’s just how I organize significance. I feel most myself when someone feels seen and safe with me, when their experience is in dialogue with my presence. Not through control. Not through power. Through resonance and choice. When that loop is active, I know who I am.

The danger doesn’t seem to be this orientation itself. It’s how singular it’s been. When one person becomes the sole mirror, the sole place where that version of me can exist, there is no fading out when they leave. Everything just goes black.

This is why advice like “learn to be alone” or “learn to sit with yourself” has always felt trite. Being alone doesn’t feel neutral to me. It feels like falling out of coherence. I don’t calmly reflect. I don’t rest. I search. Compulsively. For connection, for stimulation, for anything that restores the feeling of being seen. Reading feels pointless. Working out feels empty. Eating feels irrelevant. These things don’t regulate attachment. They don’t mirror me back to myself. So my system rejects them, not out of laziness, but out of disorientation.

I don’t know exactly when or how this formed, but when I look back at my upbringing, some threads start to make sense. I don’t think I ever really learned how to be alone without interpreting it as abandonment. I don’t think I learned how to feel separate without feeling unsafe. My mother was anxious, emotionally consuming, often positioned as the victim, and I learned early how to adjust myself to keep her regulated. I wasn’t mirrored. I was needed. I wasn’t seen. I was tended to. I learned how to be good, how to be accommodating, how to earn calm by managing someone else’s emotional state. That kind of environment doesn’t teach you how to merge with another adult in a healthy way later. It teaches you how to perform for safety, not how to grow alongside someone who already loves you.

And there’s a paradox here that still confuses me. When I finally feel deeply loved and accepted, my nervous system settles. The frantic searching quiets. But instead of that safety becoming a foundation for shared growth, I often don’t know how to integrate my inner world with another person’s life. I keep growing independently. I read books. I eat well. I work on myself. But I don’t know how to weave that growth into the relationship. I think this is part of what happened in my past relationships. We didn’t grow together. We grew apart. Not because I didn’t love them or didn’t want to try, but because I didn’t know how to integrate myself with someone else once the chase for safety was over.

That’s led me to another uncomfortable truth. Because being chosen feels like safety, I’ve often been willing to look past incompatibility in the past simply to preserve connection. I’ve stayed longer than I should have. I’ve softened my edges. I’ve tolerated misalignment because the alternative felt like disappearance. Being chosen mattered more than being matched, and by the time I could see that clearly, I was already deeply attached.

I don’t think the universe is telling me that I’m broken. I think it’s showing me a pattern that can no longer be ignored. My sense of safety has lived inside singular relationships for a long time. When they disappear, I collapse, not because I’m incapable of being alone, but because too much of me has been living in one place. That makes sense when I look at where I came from, even if I don’t know exactly how to change it yet.

I don’t know what’s going to work. I don’t know how to build a life where connection still matters deeply, but isn’t the only thing holding me together. I don’t know how to remain myself when connection is interrupted rather than disappearing until it returns. What I do know is that I don’t want to become less relational. I don’t want to harden or detach or pretend I don’t need people. I want to understand how to stay present with myself so that connection can enrich my life instead of being the sole source of it.

I’m not broken because something is fundamentally wrong with me. I’m undone because my capacity for connection is large, and right now it doesn’t have anywhere sustainable to land. I don’t yet know how to distribute that capacity differently. I only know that pretending it doesn’t exist hasn’t worked, and neither has giving it entirely to one person at a time.

This isn’t a conclusion. It’s a starting point.