On Human Connection, and Getting Older

I am not really a mean person, in actuality. But as I have gotten older and experienced the disappointments of failed relationships, or feeling as though people will never really “get” me, it’s been just as easy to reclaim the words “intimidating,” “bullheaded,” “bitchy” and “intense” just to keep people at a distance, or at least get shit done. It often blows up in my face – reputations earned, assumptions made, whatever.

I had a very tight-knit group of girlfriends leaving high school, going into college. I made new friends, sure. But my two besties from my days at Rosstucky withstood the angst of our teen years and formed strength in the face of break-ups, travel, graduations, graduate degrees, marriages, career success & failures, family crises, illnesses & deaths, relocations, infertility and infidelity. Perhaps my biggest injustice to the rest of the world was to assume that relationships should have the bond of sisterhood like the three of us have. (* of note, I originally wrote “three of us had,” because as we get older, are established in three separate cities with three very different lives, I feel like we have reached a place of no return. But I do cling to the hope that these two women know me enough to be able to resume where we left off, regardless of time, arguments and distances).

In bringing up our sisterhood, I will reference one point, when I was eighteen and in a relationship with a boy back in Rosstucky. I clung to our relationship like sand – the tighter my fist, the more sand escaped. My girlfriends approached me with kindness and respect for my humanity as much as my intelligence. She offered that perhaps my relationship with this boy was co-dependent in ways that diminished my independence and hampered my growth. Stubbornly, I denied it, but once he broke up with me, and I reacted in ways that I am ashamed to admit now, I realized how right she was. As headstrong as I was, I also yearned for human connection. While there is nothing wrong with these traits, as we know that the exaggeration of that is poison – to be so independent as to not acknowledge debts & sacrifices of others for your own success, or, in this case, yearning for validation through human connection.

To get over my ex-boyfriend, and ultimately what helped me learn to stand on two feet again, was learning to create distance between my emotions and human connection. Or, at least, human validation. It’s not a stone wall; in fact, I recall dozens of times that I looked (and still look) for validation for my own self. But my tactics were this: digitally block all connection (at this day in age, I’m talking about AOL Messenger, theFacebook, email), not inform him of my new phone number (as I had just moved) and to throw myself into whatever project I could to distract myself fully (at the time, it was my new Anatomy and Physiology courses). Basically, I forced myself to pretend that this person did not exist.

Healthy? No, perhaps not. But time heals all wounds.

As I aged out of my twenties, and into my thirties, I learned to use this tactic time and time again.  Distance does not make the heart grow fonder – distance keeps the disappointment, pain and judgement away. Honesty is not an offensive weapon, but a defensive one. “Don’t like me? Too bad, I’m too old to give a shit what you think about me.” In a sense, that is true.

I don’t apologize for how I feel. I just regret the loneliness of that, I suppose.