Hey, 20yo self:

(oh gods that was a long time ago, jfc)

A book that I’m reading about attachment styles in the context of adult relationships tells me that as a person’s attachment style shifts from high anxious attachment towards an earned secure attachment, they will most likely experience a phase of mildly avoidant attachment.

Menanno writes that attachment styles exist on a spectrum from disorganized (“go away/don’t leave me”) to secure (“I’m right here and you’re right here and it’s going to be okay.”)

As anxiously attached people heal from the old, old wounds (on purpose) and learn how to access a more secure side of our personalities, we’ll be less overwhelmed with separation anxiety and more comfortable disengaging and enjoying solitude than we used to be. Someday, a little more distance will feel easier than the perpetual yearning for closeness. Empathy for the avoidants in our life grows. After a lot of character development, it is possible to get from a place of “I need such constant reassurance that the people in my life don’t hate me (because I am secretly terrible aha) that I am perpetually creating interactions which make them uncomfortable and push them away” to “I know their love isn’t going anywhere, so I can safely let that worry quiet down, for now.”

You’re going to lose some people along the way to shedding insecurity. You’re going to lose people who feel important and it’s going to hurt. You’re going to date your best friend from high school and be your absolute worst self in that relationship and he’s going to look you in the eyes and tell you he doesn’t want to be your friend anymore, and it’s going to suck ass so hard you almost end up in the hospital and you will honestly never be the same after that moment. The boundaries and the dynamics in the relationships which somehow survive the absolute worst you can throw at them are going to shift and change. Your loved ones are going to grow and change into new iterations of themselves and it’s going to be an absolutely beautiful thing to watch- heck, you’re going to be a different person in five years that you were when you were nineteen. And then one day it’ll be a cold and sunny day in the middle of winter and you’re look up and fully realize the presence of the ones who are still here, and it will mean more to you than you will ever be able to put into words. We learn to reach out more gracefully, we also learn to respond more gracefully when other people reach out for us.

One day you’re going to be the one who doesn’t have the energy for a visit or doesn’t text back for a couple of weeks because you’re tired and that doesn’t mean you love your friends any less, it just means you’re fucking tired. All the time. And you’ll look back to the you who felt like everyone hated you if they didn’t right back right away, and you’ll understand. And that’s gonna hurt, too.

But you aren’t tired all the way down to the bones, now. Not right now. Just tired in a way that makes you move more slowly on the way to wash your face and get yourself a glass of water to drink in the morning.

You used to wonder what the fuck it meant when people said “you just have to put in the work” to keep your relationships healthy. Do what work? They often failed to specify.

Part of the work is reading. Research. Participating in conversations ranging from the strictly academic to casually exploratory scrolling on IG to intentionally trauma informed discussion. The work involves listening to people who took the time to share their own hard-won insights into the question of how to love properly. Learning more about this is a perpetual thing, a constant and ongoing process, which will never truly be done.

You stood at the edge of the lake for an hour after the first time you read that line from the Andrea Gibson poem, Wellness Check – “is my attention on loving, or is my attention on who isn’t loving me?” It rocked your world.

Part of the work is learning how to take better care of yourself. Better late than never. A healthy body which can walk for a long time, hike up steep hills, lift heavy things, gets enough sleep, eats enough good food, stays clean – this kind of body has room for a mind which maybe doesn’t suffer quite so much as it used to. You will also learn that “healthy” and “small enough to fit into your favorite old blue jeans” do not mean the same thing.

Part of the work was spiritual. Walking in the woods. Writing. Watching the geese. Waterfall hikes. Kissing. Exploring fictional universes. Drinking tea whilst wrapped up a cozy blanket with the cat and the sound of the fireplace.

Part of the work was just – loving, badly, doing it wrong, learning how to repair things that got broken and not throw them away in shame.

And part of it was finding people who loved you, on a bad hair day when your mind was scattered, people who knew how to tell you that they loved you as often as you needed to hear it. Trusting your instincts about people. Taking the risk of asking them to love you, with your persistent presence in their lives, even if they might say no.

You learned. You grew. You aren’t done growing.