Disconnected

Avoidance, Intimacy, and Feeling Disconnected From Self

I can’t remember the last time I hugged someone and squeezed them tightly instead of holding my breath and waiting for it to be over. I cannot remember the last time I initiated a hug out of pure emotion. I cannot remember the last time I kissed someone with my eyes completely closed. Feeling disconnected is such a numbing experience yet it takes so much effort to not fully feel. And it mostly isn’t even a conscious choice. The more life throws at you; it just gets easier to not feel as deeply.

My starved inner self has hummed in my ear for the past two years as I tried to put my physical life back together again. I forgot and partially chose to ignore the repair that needed to be done within, and it drove a wedge between me and myself. After a period of struggle and stagnation, getting your physical world together feels like the key to feeling better. Like, if all of my ducks are in a row then the voices can’t win, or they’ll at least quiet down.

What caused this separation from myself? What could have made me retreat from my inner most feelings and when did I become avoidant? When you no longer have the time to sit with the things that happen to you and the emotions that come with it, where do those emotions go? I ignored the heaviness that came with my traumatic experiences, I did not want to feel them. I was simply happy that they were not happening anymore, and with that happiness rested a commitment to never caring as much again, not dwelling too much, reserving a piece of myself always so that I could survive a little less hurt than the last time. Avoiding the intimacy of feeling tremendous pain only delays when you feel it. It is not a matter of if the flood walls will break, but when. I knew that I had been needing to reconnect with my inner most self for a while. The number of things I tried to pile on my plate at the start of this fall was ridiculous. A cruel twist of synchronicity brought about a hurt that demanded to be felt without delay as I began to busy myself to avoid fall melancholy.This hurt reflected how long I had spent avoiding my inner self and that it was starting to show in my hesitation to connect with others. While I value conversation and human connection, I’ve always struggled to stay connected to others. This may be because I have only child syndrome or just my air sign nature. But my relationship with myself is one I’ve always been able to count on and come back to.

I am ever changing and because of this, so are my needs. I’ve always tried to keep an intimate relationship with myself. But something happened in the last two or three years that made me abandon the need to stay connected with myself. I kept trying to reach out and connect intimately with others and that did not work so I figured it would be easier to numb and detach from me, from them, and from the need to feel intimacy at all. I think I was mostly dreading the end of summer because the quietness of winter and fall make it much harder to ignore yourself.

When you avoid yourself by extension you end up avoiding true intimacy and connection with others. All the stress I internalized from the last few years caused my libido to suffer and for a while I was scared id never want to have sex again, at least not sober. Intimacy is such an important part of being human. Intellectual intimacy, emotional intimacy, experiential intimacy, all of it. I miss when my responsibilities and inhibitions were little to none and I could stay up until whenever belly laughing about whatever with friends, with myself, with a potential lover. I miss working something out with someone conversationally and feeling that connection of concluding together. I miss sex without the intended goal of an orgasm or racing to finish, but just so that I could feel one with that person. How do I learn to surrender myself to connection or the possibility of connection?

My ego has led and misled my interactions for a while. A protective armor that keeps me in and people out. Whether you perceive me wrongly or not does not matter because my ego told me I am perfect. But giving the people in my life the displeasure of only interacting with my ego only creates a larger distance between me and them. With the discomfort of reconnecting with myself and figuring out what that relationship should look like now, I must learn how to feel connected and have intimate relationships.