I Hate Goodbyes

And that's okay

In case you’re new here, I’m going to give you an abridged version of a thing that happened when I was four years old, with as little fanfare as possible. Just the facts as I remember them. Basically everything was great, my mom and dad were married and we lived in NYC, and we spent a lot of time with my maternal grandma who laughed and hugged easily and often. We also spent a lot of time with my aunt, uncle, and my four cousins who were all older than I was - between 8-12 years, respectively. I thought they were the coolest ever, and they were sweet to me because I was the baby. They were in New Jersey, and we spent many weekends with them and every holiday, and summers together down at the Jersey Shore. Then, in rapid succession everything blew up. My grandma had been sick and it turned out she had cancer. My parents had been fighting because my dad began an affair when my mom was 7 months pregnant with me and she found out when I was 3 months old. He never stopped cheating on her after that even though he lied about it, and he didn’t do a good job covering his tracks because he was a narcissist and figured if he walked down Broadway holding hands with other women and my mom’s friends called to tell her - which they did - he’d just deny it. The week before my fourth birthday my grandma died, and the following week my dad left because my parents had only been keeping up appearances for my grandma since she was so sick. My mom was grieving and exhausted and I think she was also ashamed her marriage had fallen apart, so she took me to a farm where her friend lived, and left me there for what felt like a very long time. It could have been a number of days, it could have been a few weeks, it could have been longer than that. I’ll never know because she would never tolerate questions about it, let alone answer them. I think she was furious that I had any memory of the farm at all. This is not the farm, but it will do:

Photo by Natalia Shavlova on Unsplash

It doesn’t take a psychologist to tell you when everyone you know, love and cherish suddenly disappears and you have no clue where you are, who you’re with, or if your mother is ever coming back, you’re probably going to have some abandonment issues - especially if it happens when you’re four and your personality is still forming. Whatever, I spent hours of my life in therapy so I can write about all of it, or talk about it, or recognize when my fear is rising to the surface. Therapy and gallows humor will get you through a lot it turns out. At a certain point, I didn’t want to accept this thing about myself, shrug my shoulders and decide that was it, I was just going to live with fear of abandonment for the rest of my life, so I did some somatic work around it, too. Meaning, I figured out how to work with my fear on my yoga mat, so when I’m afraid in life, I don’t let it stop me and I don’t let it derail me. If you’re wondering how you work with fear on your yoga mat, it usually crops up around poses where there’s the potential that you might fall on your face. No one really likes to do that, nor do people want to break their necks, so fear is a normal response to certain poses that require focus, strength, balance and flexibility in equal measure, along with practice. If you can approach poses like that and keep working on the building blocks and not get discouraged if you do fall nine thousand times along the way until you get it, you’re learning how to work with your fear. And if you can do it on your mat, you can do it anywhere. 

Poses like this, for example. Photo credit: my friend Josh.

Even if you do a lot of work around your childhood wounds, and even if you rewire your system from the ground up, you’re probably going to be triggered from time to time. You can heal and grow and strengthen, but the old system is still there, dormant, until something or someone trips it off. For example, maybe a close friend blows off a ten year friendship in a very lame break up text and unfollows you on social media like this is high school and not life. Then you get to tip your hat at your old pesky abandonment stuff, reassure yourself that you’ve got this, and carry on. You don’t have to act on your fear, or let it overtake you, or text back twenty times because you need external reassurance that you have value as a person and as a friend. You don’t have to text back at all. You can reassure yourself because you know those things to be true, and you understand you deserve better than that. Screw it - you say inside your head - life is too short, and you mean it. You watch your tendency toward codependence, because some is fine and natural if you’re close to someone, but too much is exhausting and unhealthy. You figure out what you need to heal so you don’t want to chase after emotionally abusive assholes who say you aren’t hot enough for them, if people want to walk away from you, you show them the door, if someone gives you the feeling that they get off on hurting the people who come too close, you head in the other direction, and narcissists lose their fascination for you. It’s fucking great and freeing and necessary, you should totally try it. Nonetheless, you’re probably always going to experience a little extra sting when someone exits your life, or when you have to leave because if you don’t, your soul is going to be crushed. I’ve been in both scenarios, of course. 

I don’t know which is worse, leaving or being left. It’s really hard either way. Being left brings up all those feelings around rejection and self-doubt and whether you’re lovable at your core, and doing the leaving is a nightmare because you assume the person you’re leaving is going to suffer the way you would if you were left. No one likes to be the bad guy. Well, no one sane, anyway. I was listening to Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ fantastic podcast, Wiser Than Me where she interviews women who are older and thus have more life experience, and Jane Fonda kicks off her first season. It’s an extraordinary conversation I’m still thinking about days later, but one of the things that hit me in the solar plexus was an exchange when JLD asked Jane Fonda how she had known in her past when a relationship was coming to an end, and Jane Fonda said she knew it was over when she would begin to picture the man’s funeral. Ya’ll. Y’ALL!!! It is not that she wanted the man to die, it’s that it was easier for her to fantasize about him dying than it was to gather herself up and leave. I gasped in the car because I thought that was just me. I have been that desperate in my life. I have felt like I might die inside a relationship, but the thought of hurting someone else felt impossible. If the guy was abusive or horrible, it still wasn’t easy to leave, but it was maybe possible eventually. But if the guy was nice, but the relationship was dead or dying or not inspiring or growing, it didn't occur to me that my unhappiness was enough of a reason. The thought of how awful the person would feel to be left - I just couldn’t bear the thought of doing that to anyone. So I would stay, and I’m going to tell you, sometimes I would think, maybe they will just die peacefully in their sleep and then this can end because there is no other way out. But I didn’t actually want that to happen, I just felt so trapped I would have chewed my own foot off to get out. Eventually, of course, I grew and began to understand that everyone deserves to be loved wholeheartedly, and pity is a poor and unworthy placeholder. You do no one any favors by staying if the love is gone. But there was a time when I didn’t understand that, so I got it when Jane Fonda said what she said. And even though I’ve grown and don’t start planning funerals in my head if I need to leave a relationship - I still hate goodbyes, even now.

Blurriest pic, but also happiest. My grandma (Nanny).

A lot of the time we really are projecting. We assume other people will take things as hard as we do. Other people will be as devastated and heartbroken as we would be if someone left us, or let us down in some way, so we don’t say anything. Better to forgive the person inside my own head then tell them how their actions made me feel, causing them days of torture and self-flagellation over having done something so hurtful or thoughtless. But not everyone operates that way, and there was a time in my life when this was a revelation to me. There are people who take things on the chin. You say, hey, that thing that happened felt confusing to me, or terrible, or upsetting and they say, oh, shoot. I didn’t mean it like that at all, I’m so sorry, it won’t happen again. And then they are done! They do not beat themselves up or berate themselves for hours and days over being human and not getting everything right every second. They just accept they’re going to make mistakes sometimes and assume you will accept that, too. That’s a healthy person. Maybe they never had the fucked up wiring, or someone modeled self-forgiveness or apologized in a heartfelt way when they made a mistake. It’s the same about being left. I mean, if someone is in love with you and you leave, it’s going to hurt like hell, but there are people in this world who will not immediately decide it’s because they aren’t good enough, or because they deserve to be left. It will hurt, they will lean on their loved ones, they might go and talk to a therapist if they’re really struggling, but ultimately they will decide if you left, then clearly it wasn’t a good fit on both sides. And life will go on.

I don’t get attached easily, it takes me a long time to suss people out and decide I feel safe - but when I do, I really do. And I will go to the mat and swing for the fences and ride at dawn and every other thing for the people I love, and I will get on a plane if they need me and I will try to think of things that might make them feel how loved they are, just because - for no reason except it’s a Tuesday. But I hate goodbyes. Some of my closest friends live far away - at least a plane-ride away - and when I get to see them it’s the best thing ever, and when it’s time to say goodbye, I want to wrap my arms around them and never let go because life is fragile and you can’t take a thing for granted. Once not too long ago, I had to leave someone who’s a plane ride away, and I started crying like a little kid, and couldn’t stop. Maybe hating goodbyes is the same thing as really loving people, did you ever think of that? And maybe it isn’t a thing to fix. 

When you get this, I will be in Portugal, so I am not doing a live recording of the podcast this week. But it is done and will show up in your inbox Saturday like clockwork because I am Type A and recorded it before I left. Because I love you like that. Thank you for being here.