I disappear into the person I love. I am the permeable membrane. If I love you, you can have everything. You can have my time, my devotion, my ass, my money, my family, my dog, my dog’s money, my dog’s time, everything. If I love you, I will carry for you all your pain, I will assume for you all your debts (in every definition of the word), I will protect you from your own insecurity, I will project upon you all sorts of good qualities that you have never actually cultivated in yourself and will buy Christmas presents for your entire family. I will give you the sun and the rain, and if they are not available, I will give you a sun check and a rain check. I will give you all this and more, until I get so exhausted and depleted that the only way I can recover my energy is by becoming infatuated with someone else…
…Be lonely Liz. Learn your way around loneliness. Make a map of it. Sit with it, for once in your life. Welcome to the human experience. But never again use another person’s body or emotions as a scratching post for your own unfulfilled yearnings.” – Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)
Somehow relationships are always stitched into the seams of depression. We’re triggered into dopamine floods of ecstasy, and then, just as effortlessly, with broken hearts, plummet into the darkest version of black there is.
Love, and the often hidden addiction to love, can be very accurate reflections of the gaping holes in our souls. We mirror our pain in the ones we choose to become infatuated with.
The bad boy who destroys me with his manipulation and lies is a recurring messenger with different faces until I learn to see it has nothing to do with them, and everything to do with me.