Never mine

Today started out better. It felt like the shock had settled, like I was coming to terms with reality. I managed to sort some stuff at home, went out on my bike, ate some soup.

Then I realised I felt strangely numb and calm and couldn’t really work out what all the fuss was about. Like why would it matter K is leaving?  She’s not so important, not really. Not important at all in fact. Who even is she? Ah dissociation, how I love you.

And then a bit later…  BAM.

Right back in the attachment pain and annihilation hell. Topped with a lot of grief, waves and waves of it in fact. Because there is simple grief here too, as well as all the transference – someone I have spent hundreds of hours with, the person I have shared the most intimate and painful parts of me and my story with at least twice a week for almost 3 years, is leaving. And there will be no space for me in her life anymore. I will be someone she always remembers fondly, but I will not be part of her life and I will have to learn to live without her. Somehow.

And all I wish is that I could go back to the time when I didn’t know what was missing inside me and didn’t feel it nearly all the time. Like for so many of us, starting therapy put me in touch with all the unmet needs and yearnings that I had carried all my life, showed me what (or rather who) made the hole I had spent my whole life desperately trying to fill, and then offered me some tiny amounts of what I needed back then, just so I could experience the pain inherent in the contrast between what I had and what I could have had. 

Since starting therapy I’ve spent most of the time wandering around desperately aware that something in me is missing. In the time before therapy I didn’t know and in so many ways it hurt less. I felt that pain sometimes, sometimes more often than not, but I didn’t know what it was caused by. I scrabbled around as best I could and sometimes I filled it with things that were bad for me, but other times, as I got older, it seemed to be filled with good things – singing, meditation, yoga, being by the sea, riding my bike. It wasn’t all great – there were drugs and bad-for-me men and self-harm and dissociation, and I had a breakdown when one of my best friend’s committed suicide, but in the time between beautiful Jess’s death and starting therapy there were still times when I was healing by myself, knew what I needed and how to give it to myself. And then I started therapy and the hole was revealed and suddenly it became too big to fill by myself. K has poured so much into that hole, but not enough, I am not full up yet and I am not yet able to fill myself up. I need her. I need her with me. Sometimes I fill myself up and I want to tell her about it, I want to feel her pride showering down on me. Soon I won’t be able to tell her anything. Nothing at all. She will hear nothing about my life and my healing. I will just be somebody that she used to know.

She has never been mine. And that has always hurt more than words can say. She has never been mine to miss, need, want, love, but soon she will not even be mine to see. She is actually going to walk away from me. And because I am not hers this will be easy for her to do. I honestly thought I’d felt abandonment pain before, but this is something else. I am drowning inside myself.

I see K tomorrow at 2pm and I have no idea how it will be. How do we begin to piece all this together and move forward in our work with the end coming sooner than either of us had anticipated? How will we ever find our way through this storm together? How will we hold on to each other when the turmoil in me threatens to sweep us both away? And even if we come out the other side together, as soon as we are through the storm we will smile with relief at each other and then each walk our separate ways.

And I will spend the rest of my life looking back, missing her, wishing for something that was never mine to wish for.