No Holiday Picture for Me

Elisa A. Escalante/ LCSW/ 03-2-2024

“Every Pain you have will have an answer. It just won’t come soon enough. And why should it? Why have the arrogance to believe you get to know why? Why have the ego to believe that you deserved better? Or the premonitions to believe that you know what’s next? GET OUT OF YOUR HEAD. LIVE.” - EaE

   I finally wanted to do one of those ‘lame Holiday pictures’ leading up to the Christmas of 2023. Not necessarily matching pajamas. But a cute idea with costumes, and my Boyfriend, and my Cat. It would have been the first time. Except we broke up 11 days before Christmas instead. I am not yet ready to write about why. Maybe I will be one day, or maybe never. But, I do believe it’s necessary to break the ice and talk about my feelings. The feelings of being in my Mid thirties, and yet again, having another long term relationship ‘fail’. The feeling of getting 3 promise and/ or engagement rings, but never putting them to use, because I never do get married. Seeing almost all of my peers getting married and/ or having kid’s, especially seeing the pictures during the Holidays. Feeling so out of place because I truly know that it is not ‘in the cards for me’ to have the same life. I don’t necessarily feel sad about not having a family, I believe more than anything, I feel robbed that I do not have the emotional capacity for it. But also, it’s okay because I am coming to terms with it. I am becoming more okay with who I am and the life I want to live.

  We live in a society that is sort of obsessed with what is known as the ‘Relationship escalator’. These ‘norms’ that we ought to go by because, well it’s the ‘thing to do’. Modern times have created some shifts, but ultimately the ‘norm’ is supposed to look something like this: Meet, date casually, Then become exclusive, then either marry or live together first, and then it’s time to talk about kid’s! (Assuming you can afford rent or a mortgage to house the kid’s) For as long as I can remember, the idea of this relationship escalator scared the hell out of me. I always found myself stuck in these long term relationships, and often times, okay with nothing changing. But also, dissatisfied because too often, it feels like a lie. Who am I kidding? I am not cut out for this. My Mom was not cut out for it, My Dad was not cut out for it. Most of my family members are not. But then again, some people are. I just wish over and over that I was not fed the fairy tale of the ‘happily ever after’. I wish that I grew up in a world where people told me that it’s okay to not want what everyone tells you to want. It’s okay to want something different. It’s okay that I was a young girl that grew up dreaming about a career and providing for myself, and did not spend time dreaming about a forever husband.

I am now 3 months single again. And, I get the same lines fed to me that I did last time I was single. “Don’t worry….. you will find the one”. “They just weren’t the ‘one’ for you.” “Just take care of you and focus on you… it will be okay”. They push positivity onto us, but they do not know where our minds are at. What if, when someone says they are done, they really mean it? What if we only have so much heartbreak we can take and then we must retire early from conventional relationships? I have had clients that made the decision to never do conventional relationships again. They chose to grow old living alone, or date in ‘unconventional’ ways outside of the escalator that did not lead to marriage. And guess what? They are still alive and quite a few were happy and content with their choices. It was not the end of the world for them. Their life did not end just because they chose not to spend every day with one person forever.

I know that it will work for some people. Some people do get the ‘happily ever after’ with their ‘one’… and then there are people like myself, that don’t even want to try again. I see the pictures of my peers. Marriage, kids, engagements, relationships pictures. Announcements… exclusivity. And I smile for them through my tears. I am happy for them, but I am also grieving for myself. Because I know it’s not possible. Yes could I try to force it? Sure. But it would be unbearable. I know myself too well. And I know what’s next for me. But I have to take my time.

Between long term relationship 1 and 2, I was mostly attachment anxious the whole way. Then between relationships 2 and 3, I became attachment disorganized. Now that relationship 3 is over, I appear to have gone from attachment disorganized, to attachment avoidant. I have never in my life felt so repulsed by the idea of dating or intimacy. Yes, 3 months isn’t long, but it usually never took me this long to at least enjoy the idea of a date. I’m still not there. I have been working with a new therapist, my favorite so far. And he has already helped me establish and communicate my new hard boundaries for myself. He is also helping to empower me to learn more about myself and what I truly want going forward.

I believe after my first long term break up, I felt cheated out of my time. Almost like my time was ‘wasted’. Then after my second break up, I felt rageful. This time, I keep feeling an insane amount of guilt. This is the hardest one to shake. Guilt is an emotion that I have walked around with throughout my entire life. A guilt of just existing. A guilt due to feeling unworthy and out of place. Like I did not belong anywhere because I wasn’t wanted anywhere. A guilt that led me to fawn/ people please to often keep the peace. This time, I stood up for myself and broke off something bad before it got even more unhealthy. And because this is so out of character for me, I continue to sit in discomfort. It’s sad that I was conditioned to put others above myself, to a point that it feels so wrong to actually choose myself first this time. But I needed to do it, because with wisdom comes the ability to see the ‘writing on the wall’. The more I live the most I can almost sort of, see my future before it unfolds. I can also feel the danger within my body, not just my mind.

I know that I have grown from this, and it has humbled me in a way I never have been humbled before. Unlike with breakup number two, this this time, there hasn’t really been any immature words or memes posted on my end. I don’t want to shame or blame or deflect my role in things. I truly hope we both heal. Most broken relationships are two broken people that were trying to fit together and become whole. But, that is codependency. Healing cannot take place when we rely too hard on others to fix things that we are too afraid to fix for ourselves.

“It will be the source of every bad decision you make. The root cause of every empty void you must fill. It will always come back to this. You feel so unworthy of life, and so damn guilty with every breath. With every second of existing. It will not matter how much they wrong you. They will never hurt you like you hurt yourself.” -EaE