17: abandonment wounds 🔗
on emotional hoarding, fires on the roof, and friendship breakups (august 2021)
Iteration #17 of this monthly letter full of feelings. This issue's theme is: ⟢ ⚘ ♥︎ abandonment wounds ♥︎ ⚘ ⟣
A Time Traveling Feelings Letter (or, the longest time jump so far)
〰️〰️〰️ sent on July 1, 2023 〰️〰️〰️
I am a walking monument to my abandonment wounds. My entire career is rooted in the desire to be needed, to be valuable, to be worth keeping around. My lifelong preoccupation with documentation grew from a fear of loss – photography is a way for me to keep everything. Emotionally hoarding nostalgia, afraid to let go of anything that feels even close to belonging. I’m overly sensitive, difficult to navigate emotional intimacy with (when that itself is what I crave). my default state is hypervigilance, always trying to be the best version of myself so nobody will ever want to leave me. Not being included, not feeling wanted – it sends me into a panicked spiral. I don’t know if I see things the way other people see things when I’m like this. I’m not sure if I can trust my own perception through the wounds.
I’ve been putting off writing this letter for so long, at first because I was embarrassed of how it’d be perceived – I didn’t want this person or that person to think I was talking about them. And then I kind of did want them to know I was preoccupied with their absence, I wanted to yell into the void: “aren’t you thinking about me? Don’t you miss me like I miss you?!” But before I could muster the words, something else would happen that made me feel like hiding in my shell again, unable to handle the confrontation of putting myself out there. Every small rejection or misunderstanding felt earth shattering.
I thought I would write about this in August of 2021 and tie up so many feelings in pretty little bows. Things were kind of making sense for a minute. I was communicating more clearly. I had been living with my mom and stepdad for a year. My stepdad was still alive after a year of anticipating his death. I was feeling the reverberations of the past summer, moving from our brooklyn apartment to the basement bedroom. I had one really nice visit to the city where everything was like a cheesy rom com. My brother and his family had just moved into the bedroom upstairs. Dust was getting kicked up in a big way; I was naming my fears and insecurities and taking responsibility for my outsized reactions. I had been working on a grief podcast that was beginning to feel real and I was actively noticing any instincts to sabotage myself. Obviously pretty bows almost instantly come unraveled. Every time I felt like I was making sense of something, the other shoe would drop.
I suppose in an effort to stop gaslighting myself, I began saying it out loud whenever I felt crazy or like I was having an “inappropriate” reaction. Oh, this is my abandonment wound acting up. The panic, fear, paranoia, all of the visceral things shaking through my body at the thought of an unanswered text or a party I wasn’t invited to – I could point to the reason it felt so much more intense than it should feel, why I wasn’t reacting in a normal way. Giving it a name heightened the paranoia of giving people more reasons to leave me or at the very least roll their eyes at me, but giving it a name also helped soften the shame of why am I like this.
I’ve had a hard time getting comfortable with the idea that I have abandonment issues. I felt like a fraud whenever it would come up. I wasn’t actively left by someone, they died. It feels out of line to claim the term. It’s not like he chose to leave me; he would have stayed if he could have. He would have chosen me.
We talked a lot about this hesitance to claim “abandonment” in my dinner party group – we’d each lost a parent before the age of 18, so we all had this funky kind of grief that felt like imposter syndrome. I don’t remember exactly what was said (but I do remember exactly where I was sitting), when someone broke it open for me: we were fucking kids; we weren’t even old enough to make sense of being alive, let alone what it meant to die. One day my dad was with me and then he wasn’t – one day I was receiving love and then it was gone, not to mention the spaces in between: the strokes, surgeries, the hospital, hospice care, or the time when he got his own apartment because he thought that pushing us away would make it easier on us than watching him die. I have a memory (though I’m not sure if it’s real) of going there once to get our pots and pans, wondering why dad seemed different. How could anyone explain to a toddler that one of the two people they’ve known most intimately so far in their short life is changing, and soon will be physically gone?
At a certain point in development, my childhood brain made sense of my grief by subconsciously telling myself the story that I deserved to grow up without a dad. Otherwise, why did it happen? I must have deserved it. I was told over and over again that everything happens for a reason and “god has a plan.” I was also aware of how loved my dad was and how good of a dad he could have been – what kind of poor planning is that? I, again, would like to speak to the universe’s manager. The only logical explanation was that I was rotten, capital B bad, undeserving. There is no answer that makes sense, so you come up with whatever reasons seem conceivable. That story was confirmed by friends and crushes throughout adolescence who had decided I was Too Much for them. More than any normal friend can be expected to take on. “They just like simple friendships” was something I’d hear over and over again when trying to make sense of why somebody didn’t choose me. My attachment style is complicated. I guess what they’re saying is I’m not easy to love. Not only am I difficult, but my reasons don’t make any sense. What are you talking about, you don’t feel safe? Why are you panicking? Why are you freaking out? Of course you’re safe. Point to the danger. I’ve always thought I was “too emotional” or dramatic, things that young people socialized as girls are consistently regarded as. I was too sensitive and I was very aware of it, going out of my way to make sure nobody would point it out. I’m fine, really. Nevermind. No big deal. I can hang, really. Forget it.
everything is so AND
This is something my friend Connie would say when we texted about our outsized reactions to simple things. “Is it fair to call everything a dead dad reaction?” I mean, it IS. It is AND it is also everything else. I am physically safe AND I feel scared for some reason. I am hurting AND I can hold space for my actions being outsized; I am feeling abandoned AND I can recognize that relationships just change. People grow out of each other. AND.
Before we left Brooklyn, I had a dream that my dad was still alive and I couldn’t get to him before he died again. I was screaming “I’m sorry” at a polaroid photograph, consumed by the feeling that I’d failed him. I woke up crying and cried all morning, embarrassed of how shaken I was. All of my wounds felt exposed with nowhere to hide them. My nervous system was already wrecked, and I knew I only had a few hours to tidy myself up before going to photograph a wedding in Tribeca – one of my first gigs through the height of covid that left me feeling both confused and purposeful, excited to be worth hiring and also scared to put myself in a vulnerable situation. So AND. The photographs ended up being featured in the New York Times Wedding section (so cool! But also, so AND).
That morning when I was in the shower, trying to calm my nervous system and soothe myself through the crying – embarrassed to ask my partner for help and not wanting him to hear me sniffle, I heard a knock on the bathroom door. Fuck, he heard me. It’s okay, I can accept help; this is a good thing. Open yourself up to vulnerability. I cracked the door and through the crack he told me the apartment was on fire and we had to leave. What? I had a wedding to get ready for. My body held the tension in my muscles for weeks afterward. I hadn’t received a text back from a friend in months, but in the car with the wedded couple I looked down at my phone to see a text. Saw on instagram about the fire, hope you’re okay. My heart started racing and I put my phone away for the rest of the night, unable to bring another variable into my adrenaline-powered day.
Living in my mom’s house with my family of origin as I was entering my early thirties, small things would happen that would make one or all of us feel crazy. Day to day teeny tiny things would that would make one of us (usually me) feel like we were not being chosen by each other, leading someone to lash out or retreat, pushing the knife further into the collective abandonment wound. I learned to notice when my body was feeling something my mind couldn’t make sense of. When I was clumsier than usual: when I dropped a dish or tripped in the hallway, I would take extra care not to be mean to myself about it. I used to think if I could remain vigilant, I could fix anything. I thought the answer to my perceived carelessness was digging my heels in, being present. Eventually I swung in the other direction, trading disassociation for hyper-vigilance. Both cause me to drop a fragile object. I noticed it happening more when I felt scared, paranoid, confused. Most of these times, the feelings weren’t warranted on a practical level. But they were still there, and I had to move through them.
I’m on the metro north train to NYC as I’m writing the last pieces of this letter. There are some dudes across from me, watching videos at full volume on their phones. They’re talking loudly and I find them annoying, but then I hear one softly say to the other, “you’ll always have a place to stay with me.” I feel the memory pulsing through my arms of being told the same thing. A few minutes prior, I’d been lingering on a photo from that day where I’m sitting on the mattress on our old bedroom floor. It was my last therapy session in the apartment and I remember crying so much, snot just running down my face. My therapist was encouraging me to listen to that phrase: What would happen if you believed you had a place with her? How embarrassing it felt for me to be sent into such a vitriolic set of tears upon hearing those words, it should be comforting, relieving. I’m reminded of the very first time in my adolescence that I cried about my dad to a friend, it was her. I wonder how she remembers it.
I wonder if this is making sense. I wonder if I’m expressing anything that feels relatable or palettable. I wonder if people roll their eyes when I say how much I miss my apartment in New York. Why did you leave? Why don’t you just come back? As if it’s that simple. Everyone has FOMO, I’m not special for loving and leaving new york. There are books dedicated to the topic. I had lived in New York City for 11 years and bushwick for 9. It was so hard to leave but, but didn’t make sense to keep clinging so tightly to something that never felt sustainable in the first place. My therapist calls it “making room for abundance,” releasing the life I had worked so hard to keep in order to make space for a life more aligned with my values. I can’t help but feel like if I let go of something that’s good enough, maybe I’ll never find anything good again. My little couch in a sunlit corner that I’ve crawled up and cried into countless times. It was a place I felt real, consistent emotional safety in a way I hadn’t felt before. What if I never find that again?
Have I even said anything at all here? I guess I wanted to be able to have something to point to and say “see? this is what I’m talking about when I say ‘abandonment wounds.’” I guess if anyone was really curious they could just google it, but I’d still run the risk of being misunderstood. We always run that risk anyway. I guess what I’m trying to make sense of is why grief can inform an anxious attachment, why death feels like abandonment. I guess I’m just trying to make some kind of argument for why I need a few extra “I love yous” and maybe a “this is why I keep you, this is why I want you around.” Maybe it’s excessive and maybe it’s annoying but it’s my Whole Thing. Anyway, now it’s out there, maybe it’s a rough draft but these letters always are.
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This newsletter was started in the Onondaga & Haudenosaunee territory + finished in the Munsee Lenape & Schaghticoke territory + furthermore, sent from Lenapehoking & Canarsie unceded land. To learn more about the stolen land you're occupying, visit native-land.ca ⋰
Just discovered your writing and absolutely in love. You capture unnamed feelings so masterfully and effortlessly - literally such a joy to read <3
Bridge, reading you makes me feel closer to myself. "i want to keep you" because your generosity is infectious and you make people feel possible, especially artists. the gemmiest gem. i love you!