If Love is the Answer You Hold, Hold On
This one’s a personal blog post. Gasp! – those are rare. I rarely talk about my personal life on my blog, and most of my posts are either technical/academic or announcements. Sometimes I might allude to what’s been going on, but leave it vague without getting into the nitty-gritty details. Well, this is going to be quite a change of pace.
Preface
I should first and foremost start with a clear statement highlighting a fundamental part of my personality: I’m a 110% kind of person. My personality can be described at times to be very “intense,” perhaps even to a fault. I’m a “ride or die” kind of person. I always crank it up to overdrive, and I’m unapologetically devoted to what I choose to devote myself to and to whom I choose to devote myself to. This is a double-edged sword, and that’s been made clear to me these past few weeks. My eager readiness to take leaps of faith may result in either a soft splash at the bottom, or a fatal dry dive.
Unfortunately, most recently it ended up being a dry dive with myself being hurt at the bottom of it all. I recently lost a friendship, and I wish I hadn’t. This has been a demon that I’ve been scared to confront, that I’ve been scared to talk about, that I’ve been hiding from everyone and even myself, because I’m ashamed. Time has passed, and although it has been four weeks and one day since our paths diverged, I’ve still been taking time to process the pain which has become worse over time instead of better.
Lambda Tau
The story begins during the fall of 2019. This was my first semester at UC Merced, and I was volunteering for the Sustainability Department at the time. I regularly did volunteer shifts and one of the things we did was tabling on Scholar’s Lane outside the Kolligian Library. On one of my shifts, a woman came to our table to participate in the event that we were having that particular day. I remembered her specifically, as our interaction was pleasant and she had a particular shyness, a meekness about her. We were strangers then, and we were strangers after, and I hadn’t any foresight that’d ever suggest otherwise. Sure, I’d occasionally see the same person around as I went through the halls and went about my day on-campus, but I could say that about literally anyone else that I’d ever crossed paths with.
One year later, my coworker (and later, very close friend) Gamma Nu and I had started the UC Merced Discord server after recognizing and taking action to close the gap in our university’s culture that was the lack of an online community, especially in the middle of the pandemic. The server grew very rapidly and became very active in a short amount of time. I don’t think that either of us could have expected such great growth in our university’s online community, especially considering the size and youth of our school. It was here on this server that I’d asked for help with some Photoshop stuff since I was studying Photoshop EXIF data and required some samples of Photoshopped images so that I could compare their EXIF data with their non-edited originals. When I’d asked for help, it was Lambda Tau that came to my rescue. It was a friendly crossing of two paths between two strangers for what I thought was the first time. They helped create a few Photoshopped image samples, I used those samples to compare with non-Photoshopped originals, and I learned a lot about Photoshop EXIF data.
Lambda Tau and I talked more and more after that encounter, at first rarely, then occasionally, and then regularly. The more we talked, the more we learned about each other. You might have guessed it, but we learned that our paths had crossed in the past before – she was the woman who stopped by while I was volunteering from over a year earlier. We discovered that we had all the same hobbies, values, interests, and so much more. Hell, we even discovered that we were from the same hometowns, shared similar pasts, and even had the exact same birthdays. We had so much in common that some of them, particularly those erring on spooky coincidences such as mirroring each other’s birth moles on our bodies, seemed to be, at times, some sort of series of signs sent from the cosmos above. What started as something I wouldn’t have thought twice about very quickly turned into something greater: we had germinated a friendship. The days turned into weeks, which turned into months. Our dialogue became more engaged with our own back-and-forth and I loved every single moment of it. It was admittedly flirtatious at times, and although I can say that I at least didn’t mean anything by it to start, it did eventually become a bit more serious.
Somewhere along the way, I had caught feelings for Lambda Tau. I didn’t want anything to erupt from it and I tried to extinguish those feelings because I valued our friendship so much that I wouldn’t want to put it on the line. Being the upfront and straightforward individual that I am, I did tell them almost immediately after having come to this realization. Our friendship persisted and persevered, and we were happy that it did.
Come winter, come Christmas, she wanted to spend the day with me. Unfortunately, I had just gotten back from the hospital around that time and was dealing with quite a quantity of pain, and so I had to decline much to our mutual dismay. I wanted to make it up to her, and so we rescheduled for the 2nd of January. We spent the day together at the park back in our hometown, picnicking, watching the waterfowl, taking in the moments, and everything else in-between. It was our first time meeting each other in-person as friends and not as strangers. We even did a gift exchange – I got her an Among Us plushie as it was her favorite game at the time, and she got me a vintage calculator that she repaired and restored herself, a symbol of our shared interests and shared hobbies. I know, she outdid me by miles! It was such a pleasant surprise and I truly did feel the care that she put into it. I’ll spare the further details of those long hours we shared that day save that we would take the calm in in moments left unanxious, in the sunny winter day as the coolly warm air drafted, not feeling alone but feeling together. The sun began to set and we had to say daylight goodbyes, until next we met.
We kept talking after that, sending texts and messages back and forth. She invited me to go to Yosemite with her after she’d moved back up to our school at the end of break, and I was looking forward to it. Although we couldn’t go through with those plans as her move-in date got pushed back, I felt our friendship special merely pondering of the thought of running away into nature’s embrace for moments shared together.
After break, we continued seeing each other. We spent our birthday together, exploring the downtown of our small town, grabbing coffee, looking through antiques, getting a feel for the city and recognizing the coming of spring, soon. We regularly saw each other on a weekly basis, and it became kinda our thing to share a few hours of time together whenever I’d be on-campus for work. My anxiety, a forever thorn in my side from womb to grave, would sometimes make me feel doubts about myself, would sometimes make me feel doubts about whether she truly did care or if her flame had gone out long ago and I was merely dragging her along. I never wanted to make her do anything she wasn’t comfortable with, anything she didn’t want to do. I never wanted her to feel that way, and so I, again consistent with my bluntly straightforward and confrontational nature, would ask her every step of the way. She gave me words of reassurance every step of the way, assured me that she truly did care, and I took that leap of faith every single time and opened myself up every single time and let myself be more and more vulnerable every single time.
Love is giving someone the power to hurt you and trusting that they won’t.
You could imagine my surprise, then, when things began to fall apart out of the blue. It seemed totally unprompted, totally unforeseeable, totally random, when she told me that she didn’t have time or energy for us anymore and she wanted a “break,” when she told me that it drained her and had been draining her all this time. Just like that, my house of cards had fallen. All this time, I had been asking her to be straightforward and honest with me. All this time, she had given me the impression that she was. Here she was, coming clean that our shared time together had essentially been faux.
Love is giving someone the power to hurt you and trusting that they won’t, and she hurt me.
I had truly felt shattered. I had always been worried of making her feel that way, and I had always been so cautious so as to not make her feel that way, and she hid it from me the entire way for days and days as we continued sharing time and continued sharing care and continued basking in what I had thought was a genuine friendship.
Although she said that she wanted a “break,” the way that she had worded it to me made me feel that she did not actually want a “break” in a temporal sense but a “break” in a more permanent sense. Realizations and emotions plagued me for the next few weeks, understanding then, feeling then, in hindsight, that she had merely been using me to relieve her loneliness and the moment that she didn’t want me anymore, I was removed from the equation. The lines of our experiences and our lives only temporarily seemed to be converging to the same destination, but are now understood to be, unfortunately, ultimately divergent.
Reflection
I’ve had a lot of time to process the pain, and I’m still processing the pain. I’ve been thinking about who I am as a person lately. I’ve been reflecting a lot on my experiences, looking back at my past, and projecting forward onto my future.
My 110% personality, my eagerness and readiness to take leaps of faith for those whom I care for, are ultimately giving others a great power to hurt me. I love, and it is because of my love that it is so easy for others to hurt me so, so mortally. The traumas I’ve had to go through in the past closed me off for a long time and it took a lot of courage for me to open up to the world again, for me to allow myself to be vulnerable again. Although the people I’ve loved and the people I’ve trusted have hurt me, there are a few rare, exceptional individuals who take my vulnerability and use it… to heal me.
It is through the healing that they drive in me that I am able to take their love for me, learn to love, and just as importantly, give that love to others. They’ve taught me that I can open up, that I can be me, that I can be vulnerable, and they’ll still accept me for who I am and they won’t take my vulnerability and use it to hurt me. It is through these experiences that I can do the same for others. It is through this that I can help others heal, just like others have helped me heal.
There was a time when I believed that I’d rather have not gotten hurt to start than to have gotten hurt and have to heal, but I was wrong. I was young, and lonely, and I was miserable, and I was scared of people. I’ve been through a lot since then, and I’ve met extraordinary individuals who accept me and allow me to be the best me, the truest me, that I can be. I will let myself be hurt if it is an unavoidable cost of this. I will let myself be hurt, because I know that they will be there to help me heal when I inevitably will.
I must admit that after Lambda Tau took my vulnerability and stabbed it, I felt the need to close off from the world because I was scared that others around me might leave me like she did. I resisted that urge to close off from the world, and I’m glad that I didn’t lose sight of who I was, because in my shattered and vulnerable state did the people around me bring me in for warm embrace so that I could begin to recover. They remembered who I was and they helped me be me when I needed it most, when I forgot who I was.
If love is the answer you hold, hold on.
Happy trails.