Step Away from Emotional Addiction

[I wrote a version of this post in 2014, but I never published it because I took my blog private. 11/29/2018]

I consider certain people to be akin to emotional heroin for me. Oddly enough, Melissa Broder came up with a similar term (drug-people) and used it in her fabulous book So Sad Today. She talks about getting high on people. It's true. Some of us do that. It's a craving and longing, and it SUCKS.

Given what my previous post covered, I might as well deal with this.

I am addicted to wanting a particular kind of connection.

For me, that means getting emotional support from people who are tangential to my life and unpredictable, but who (sometimes) have laser-like precision in knowing exactly what I need and offering it. Then I settle in, enjoy the high, and then....I am alone and panicked again, because usually they are nowhere to be found.

I wish it did not have to be a high, and yet it is. I wonder if this is tied to my being left alone as an infant and having many unreliable caretakers. I have that constant, roiling anxiety about being unseen and unheard.

Then when certain people come in and are prescient and observe behind my masks: there is the drug. I am thinking of one person in particular who knows me incredibly well without having been in my life for the better part of two decades. Why can he do this? How is it possible? Can one put a name to a connection like that? I think I make it up, but then I know I haven't. Some people are wonderfully perceptive. But then again, they have nothing to give.

There is no sustaining that kind of feverishness, but there is a crazy seduction in someone who can see right through to your most guarded inner soul, who says things about you no one else would or can. I remember when I had a dream that my father named me, and I told him the name. He addressed me in an e-mail by that name. He did, and he is the only one who has ever called me by that name. I didn't know I wanted it, but he knew. He can sit by me when I am freaking out inside and I can hold my shit together. I know it will be okay.

Even with all that, it's not worth it, just like heroin isn't worth it. I am working hard on beating this.

As a kind man who once loved me said, "Life isn't fair. It hasn't been fair in the past, and it will surely cheat us again sometime in the future."