My Soft Rebellion

Episode Transcript:

My boyfriend said something to me the other day.

He said that I was very easy to love. And not that I was just easy to love — he actually said that I was very lovable.

This is something that I had actually never heard in my entire life growing up inside a very strict religious immigrant household. I was often told that I wasn’t doing enough, that I could be doing more. I could be smarter, prettier, more athletic, I could be a better Muslim. The list could go on in terms of the things that I could improve on.

And that’s kind of the way that I lived my life majority of the time — knowing the fact that I’m a decent person, but there are all these things that I need to do in order to one day be worthy and deserving of love.

That was the idea.

So when this man comes into my life and, you know, I recently quit my job, I’ve been so dysregulated. I’ve been all over the place. I feel like a mess. And even with my mess, being told that I’m easy to love and that I’m lovable, I was like, wow. This is so healing.

I’ve done so much work on myself, but having someone just look at me, accept me, see all these sides of me, and say, “Hey, all of it is enough. It is okay, and I’ll still hold it.”

Yeah, that was quite fundamentally healing.

And I’ve done so much work in isolation because I wanted to make sure that when love does come into my life, I’m able to hold it. That I don’t shove it away, send it away.

But it’s honestly been such an insane process because you can do so much work on yourself alone. You can try to reparent yourself and retrain your body to receive and accept love and know that your parents were just hurt, complex beings who were continuing the cycle of generational trauma, and now you’re able to break it.

It’s a whole thing.

You’re healing and healing and healing, and you think you’ve done so much work. And then one day someone says, “I love you,” and you realize how destabilizing it is. How much it makes you want to fall back into yourself because you are so good at dealing with misery and chaos and people not loving you and people fucking you over and people betraying you and abandoning you.

That’s the script that you’re used to.

So when someone comes into your life being like, “Hey, actually, I’m not going to do any of that. Can you trust me?”

It’s like, can I trust you? That I find basically almost impossible to do.

So then when love is right in front of me and literally given to me on a silver platter, I’m looking at it as if, like, are you feeding me poison? Where is the cyanide hidden in all of this care and affection that you’re giving me?

And I don’t want to be like that. I don’t.

But I just feel like it’s the way that my brain is so wired at this point. A lot of people, if I were to get technical, call it being avoidant attachment or fearful avoidant attachment.

And I basically want love, you know? Especially as someone who’s been deprived of it her whole life. Of course I want people in my life. Of course I want to trust people. Of course I want to take the love that people give me and just shower myself with it and have it sink into my body and feel it inside of my bones.

But sometimes I’m just not able to do that.

And it’s just an ongoing process of not pushing away the good things. Not assigning meaning to things that I haven’t gotten full clarification about, because I will turn meaningless, innocent situations into proof that someone is out to get me, that someone is out to hurt me.

And it’s not productive.

It’s basically resulted in a complete isolation of myself.

And I’m just really realizing that accepting other people means that I have to accept their mess just as they’re going to be accepting mine. But also, yeah, it might just be a little bit difficult for a bit. It might be a bit difficult for me to just fall into another person and know that they’re going to catch me.

But I think that’s another thing. When you do have the right people — the right patient, kind, loving people — it changes everything because they don’t see how destabilizing all this love makes you and then use it against you. They want to make you feel even more safe and secure in it.

Sometimes I think I just got really used to people seeing my instability, seeing my caution around love and care, and seeing that as a weakness. And then they start to take advantage of me and see how far they can push me not standing up for myself because I’m getting breadcrumbs of love.

And I just get so scared of being stuck in that, getting sucked into that cycle.

And I don’t want to anymore.

It’s just been a very beautiful thing to have someone in my life tell me that I’m easy to love, tell me that I’m lovable, and have them say it so freely, so generously, and unconditionally.

And if you haven’t heard it in a while as well, I’d just like to say: you’re very lovable too.

Take care of yourself.