Ameer Moavia
Bio
Stories (42)
Filter by community
Why Some Wounds Never Fully Heal
My mother died on a Tuesday in March, three weeks after her diagnosis. Cancer moved through her body with terrifying speed, leaving no time for goodbyes, no space for preparation, no chance to say all the things I'd always assumed I'd have time to say. She was here, and then she wasn't. Everyone told me the same thing: "Time heals all wounds." They meant well. But they were wrong. Fifteen years later, I still reach for the phone to call her when something good happens. Fifteen years later, I still feel the absence like a phantom limb—a presence that's missing but somehow still aches. Fifteen years later, I'm still waiting for the day when thinking about her doesn't hurt. I've finally accepted that day isn't coming. And somehow, that acceptance has brought more peace than all the years of waiting for the pain to end. The Myth of Complete Healing We're sold a particular narrative about grief, about trauma, about loss: if you do the work, if you process it correctly, if you're strong enough, you'll heal completely. The wound will close. The pain will end. You'll be whole again. But some wounds are too deep for that kind of closure. Some losses are too profound to ever fully recover from. And pretending otherwise doesn't help—it just makes us feel like failures when we're still hurting years later. I spent the first five years after my mother's death trying to heal "correctly." I went to therapy. I joined support groups. I read books about grief. I talked about my feelings. I did everything I was supposed to do. And yet, the wound remained open. I'd have months where I felt okay, where I'd think, "Finally, I'm healing." Then something small—a song, a scent, Mother's Day—would rip everything open again, and I'd be back at square one, sobbing in parking lots and grocery stores, feeling like I'd failed at grief. "Why can't I get past this?" I asked my therapist during one particularly difficult session. "It's been five years. Shouldn't I be better by now?" She leaned forward, her eyes kind. "What if this isn't about getting past it? What if it's about learning to carry it?" The Wounds That Change Us Some experiences fundamentally alter who we are. They create a before and after in our lives so profound that we can never return to the person we were. Before my mother died, I believed the world was basically safe. I believed people I loved would be around for a long time. I believed I had control over my life in ways that made me feel secure. After she died, all those beliefs shattered. I learned that safety is an illusion. That people you need can vanish without warning. That control is a story we tell ourselves to feel less terrified of existence. These weren't lessons I could unlearn. This wasn't damage I could repair. My mother's death didn't just hurt me—it changed me at a cellular level. The wound wasn't something on me; it became part of me. I spent years trying to get back to who I was before. I'd look at old photos and barely recognize the carefree woman smiling back at me. Where had she gone? Could I ever find her again? The answer, I eventually realized, was no. And that wasn't a failure. It was just the truth.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Humans
The Weight of Being "Too Much": How I Learned My Sensitivity Was Never the Problem
I was seven years old the first time someone told me I was too sensitive. I'd come home from school crying because my best friend said she didn't want to play with me anymore. My father looked up from his newspaper, irritation flickering across his face. "You're being too sensitive," he said, turning the page. "Kids say things. You need to toughen up." So I tried. I swallowed my hurt. I forced a smile. I pretended it didn't matter. That moment became a blueprint for the next three decades of my life. By the time I was thirty-seven, married with two kids and a successful career, I'd perfected the art of not feeling too much. I'd learned to laugh off insults, minimize my pain, and apologize for my emotions before anyone else could criticize them. But the cost of all that toughening up? I'd become a stranger to myself. The Education of Emotional Suppression The messages came from everywhere, each one teaching me that my natural way of being was somehow wrong. When I cried during a sad movie: "It's just a movie. Why are you so emotional?" When a friend's thoughtless comment hurt my feelings: "You're overreacting. I was just joking." When I needed time to process conflict: "You're being too dramatic. Just get over it." When I was moved to tears by beauty—a sunset, a piece of music, an act of kindness: "You cry at everything. What's wrong with you?" Each time, the same lesson: Your feelings are excessive. Your responses are inappropriate. You are too much. I learned to preface every emotional expression with an apology. "I know I'm being ridiculous, but..." "I'm probably overreacting, but..." "Sorry, I'm just too sensitive..." I became an expert at minimizing my own experience, at gaslight myself before anyone else could do it for me. The Slow Erosion of Self What happens when you spend decades being told your emotions are wrong? You start to believe it. I stopped trusting my own reactions. When something hurt me, my first thought wasn't "that was hurtful," but "I'm being too sensitive." When I felt uncomfortable in a situation, I'd override my instincts and force myself to stay, convinced my discomfort was a character flaw rather than valuable information. I became everyone's emotional support system while denying myself the same care. Friends would call me for hours when they were upset, and I'd listen with endless patience and compassion. But when I was hurting? I'd minimize it, laugh it off, handle it alone. In my marriage, I'd absorb my husband's bad moods without comment, adjust my behavior to keep the peace, and swallow my hurt when he was dismissive or short with me. "You're too sensitive" became his go-to response whenever I expressed that something bothered me. Eventually, I stopped expressing it at all. I taught my children to share their feelings, while simultaneously teaching them through my example that their mother's feelings didn't matter. I'd hide in the bathroom to cry, ashamed that I couldn't be stronger.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Humans
The Body Remembers What the Mind Tries to Forget: My Journey Through Somatic Trauma
My neck went out on a completely ordinary Wednesday. I wasn't lifting anything heavy. I wasn't in an accident. I simply turned my head to check my blind spot while driving, and suddenly, searing pain shot down my spine. By the time I pulled over, I could barely move. Three doctors, two physical therapists, and countless medical tests later, no one could find anything structurally wrong with me. "Probably stress," they said with a shrug, handing me muscle relaxers and sending me home. But I wasn't stressed. Not consciously, anyway. Work was fine. My relationship was stable. Life was, on paper, good. What none of us realized was that my body was holding a conversation my mind had been trying to avoid for fifteen years. The Accident I Thought I'd Survived I was nineteen when the car accident happened. A drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned us on a rainy November night. My best friend walked away with bruises. I walked away with a concussion and whiplash that healed within weeks. "You're so lucky," everyone said. And I believed them. I went back to college, back to my life, back to normal. I didn't have nightmares. I didn't avoid driving. I didn't think about it much at all. Except my body never forgot. For fifteen years, I'd been living with unexplained symptoms that no doctor could quite piece together. Chronic neck tension that no amount of massage could release. A startle reflex so sensitive that unexpected sounds made me jump out of my skin. Difficulty sleeping through the night. A vague sense of unease I couldn't name or explain. I'd learned to live with these things, treating each symptom as a separate annoyance rather than pieces of a larger puzzle. Until my neck gave out, and a trauma-informed therapist finally asked me the question no one else had: "Tell me about any accidents or injuries you've had." When the Body Becomes the Vault "Trauma lives in the body," she explained during our first session. "Your mind might move on, but your nervous system stays stuck in that moment of threat. Your body is still bracing for an impact that happened fifteen years ago." I wanted to argue. I'd processed the accident. I'd dealt with it. I was fine. But as she guided me through a body scan exercise, asking me to notice sensations without judgment, I felt it—a bone-deep tension in my shoulders, a tightness in my chest, a perpetual bracing as if I were permanently waiting for collision. My body had been screaming at me for over a decade, and I'd been too busy living in my head to listen. She taught me about implicit memory—how traumatic experiences get encoded differently than regular memories. When something terrible happens, especially something sudden and life-threatening, your brain doesn't have time to process it normally. Instead, the experience gets fragmented and stored as sensations, emotions, and physical responses. Your mind might forget the details. Your body never does. The Map of My Trauma Over the following months, my therapist helped me create what she called a "body map" of my trauma. We identified where I held different emotions and memories physically. My neck and shoulders: the bracing, the eternal waiting for impact, the hypervigilance. My jaw: the anger I'd never expressed, the screams I'd swallowed, clenched tight for fifteen years. My chest: the fear that had solidified into chronic shallow breathing, never quite getting a full breath. My stomach: the anxiety that manifested as digestive issues, my gut literally "tied in knots." My hands: trembling whenever I felt unsafe, my body's first line of alarm. Each physical symptom wasn't random. Each was a chapter in a story my body had been trying to tell while my mind insisted everything was fine. The Language of Sensation Learning to listen to my body felt like learning a foreign language. I'd spent my entire life prioritizing thoughts over feelings, logic over intuition, mind over matter. But my therapist insisted: "You can't think your way out of trauma. You have to feel your way through it." She taught me somatic exercises—simple practices that helped me reconnect with physical sensations I'd been dissociating from for years. Placing one hand on my heart and one on my belly, just breathing and noticing. Slowly rolling my head from side to side, paying attention to where I felt resistance. Shaking out my hands and arms, literally releasing stored tension. At first, it felt ridiculous. How could these simple movements address something as serious as trauma? But then something shifted. During one session, as I practiced a gentle neck rotation, I suddenly felt overwhelmed with emotion. Tears poured down my face. My whole body started shaking—not from pain, but from release. "That's it," my therapist said softly. "Your body is finally discharging what it's been holding. Let it happen." For twenty minutes, I shook and cried and made sounds I didn't recognize. It felt primal, uncontrolled, terrifying—and somehow, necessary. When it passed, my neck had more range of motion than it had in months.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Ghosts That Wait: Understanding Why Old Wounds Bleed in New Moments
It was just a Tuesday. Nothing special, nothing traumatic. I was standing in line at my usual coffee shop, scrolling through emails, half-present in the mundane rhythm of my morning routine. And then I heard it—a man's laugh from somewhere behind me. Deep, familiar, with that particular cadence that made my chest tighten. My hands started shaking. My breathing became shallow. Tears burned behind my eyes for no reason I could immediately name. The laugh wasn't his. The man wasn't him. My ex-fiancé lived three thousand miles away and we hadn't spoken in five years. I'd done the therapy. I'd done the healing work. I'd moved on, fallen in love again, built a beautiful life. So why was I standing in a coffee shop at nine in the morning, fighting the urge to run, feeling like I was drowning in pain I thought I'd left behind? The Myth of Linear Healing We're told that healing is a journey with a clear destination. You process the trauma, you do the work, you move forward, and eventually, you arrive at "healed." Past tense. Complete. Done. Nobody tells you that healing isn't a straight line—it's a spiral. You circle back to the same wounds at different altitudes, seeing them from new perspectives, feeling them with different intensities. You can be genuinely okay for months or years, and then something small—a song, a scent, a stranger's laugh—rips the scab off a wound you didn't even know was still there. After the coffee shop incident, I went home and canceled my meetings. I spent the day curled up on my couch, crying about a relationship that ended half a decade ago, feeling stupid and weak and confused. "I thought I was over this," I told my therapist later that week. "Why is this happening now?" She smiled with the gentle patience of someone who'd heard this question a thousand times. "You are over it. But your nervous system has a longer memory than your conscious mind. It's trying to protect you from something it thinks might happen again." The Body's Archive Our bodies are remarkable archivists. They catalog every moment of fear, every instance of heartbreak, every second of helplessness we've ever experienced. Not to punish us, but to protect us. This is what trauma specialists call implicit memory—emotional and sensory information stored below conscious awareness. When you experience something painful, your brain doesn't just file it away with a neat label and a timestamp. It creates an entire sensory network of associations: sounds, smells, times of day, tones of voice, patterns of behavior. Years later, when something in your present environment matches something from that network—even loosely—your body sounds the alarm before your conscious mind even registers the connection. That laugh in the coffee shop? My nervous system recognized it as a threat signature from my past. It didn't matter that my conscious mind knew I was safe. My body remembered betrayal, and it was trying to protect me from experiencing it again. The Triggers We Don't See Coming The cruelest thing about resurfacing pain is its unpredictability. You brace yourself for the obvious triggers—anniversaries, familiar places, certain songs. But then you're blindsided by things you never saw coming. A friend's wedding sent me into a spiral of grief about my father's death, even though he'd been gone for seven years. The smell of cigarette smoke in a parking lot transported me instantly to my childhood, to feelings of fear and uncertainty I thought I'd processed. A colleague's dismissive tone in a meeting triggered shame from bullying I experienced in middle school, decades ago. Each time, I'd feel ambushed. Each time, I'd question whether I'd actually healed at all or if I'd just been fooling myself. But I was learning something crucial: the pain resurfacing doesn't mean the healing didn't happen. It means there are layers. Healing isn't about erasing the past—it's about changing your relationship with it.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
The Weight of Words Never Spoken: What Happens When We Bury Our Emotions Alive
For years, I smiled through the pain, convinced that silence was strength. It wasn't until my body started screaming what my mouth refused to say that I learned the true cost of swallowing my truth. The panic attack hit me in the middle of a Tuesday morning meeting. One moment I was nodding along to quarterly projections, and the next, my chest tightened like someone had wrapped steel cables around my ribcage. My hands trembled. The room spun. I couldn't breathe. Twenty faces stared at me as I mumbled an excuse and stumbled out, convinced I was dying. The ER doctor's words still echo in my mind: "Physically, you're fine. But your body is trying to tell you something." I wanted to laugh. My body had been screaming at me for years. I just hadn't been listening. The Art of Pretending I learned early that emotions were inconvenient. Crying made people uncomfortable. Anger made me difficult. Sadness was selfish when others had it worse. So I became an expert at the smile that didn't reach my eyes, the "I'm fine" that meant anything but. When my father left without saying goodbye, I swallowed my abandonment and wore a brave face for my mother. When my best friend betrayed my trust, I pushed down the hurt and pretended it didn't matter. When my boss belittled me in front of colleagues, I buried my humiliation under layers of professional composure. I told myself I was being strong. Mature. Rising above it all. What I was actually doing was building a pressure cooker inside my chest, adding more heat every time I chose silence over honesty, more tension every time I said "it's okay" when it absolutely wasn't. When the Body Keeps Score The human body is remarkably honest. It will express what the mouth refuses to say. My suppressed emotions didn't disappear—they just found other ways to speak. The chronic headaches that no medication could touch. The insomnia that left me staring at the ceiling at 3 AM, mind racing with thoughts I wouldn't let myself think during daylight. The digestive issues that doctors couldn't explain. The inexplicable fatigue that made even simple tasks feel mountainous. I visited specialist after specialist, searching for a physical explanation for what was actually an emotional rebellion. My body had become a museum of unexpressed feelings, each symptom a exhibit of something I'd refused to process. The panic attacks became more frequent. My immune system weakened. I'd catch every cold, every flu, as if my body was too exhausted from managing my emotional lockdown to defend against anything else. The Breaking Point The Tuesday morning panic attack was my breaking point, but it wasn't the beginning. It was just the moment I could no longer ignore what had been building for decades. That night, alone in my apartment, I finally let myself feel. Not just the fear from the panic attack, but everything I'd been storing in the vault of my chest. The grief. The rage. The disappointment. The loneliness. The hurt.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Psyche
When Home Becomes a Memory: Learning to Let Go of the Person You Thought Was Forever
I still remember the exact moment I realized I had to let her go. We were sitting on opposite ends of the couch—the same couch where we'd spent countless nights talking until sunrise, dreaming about our future, planning adventures we'd never take. But that night, the silence between us felt heavier than any words we'd ever shared. The distance wasn't measured in inches. It was measured in all the things we'd stopped saying, all the dreams that had quietly died, all the versions of ourselves we'd outgrown. She still felt like home. That was the cruelest part. The Comfort That Becomes a Cage There's something uniquely painful about loving someone who feels like home but no longer helps you grow. For three years, she'd been my safe place—the person I ran to when the world felt too heavy, the voice that calmed my anxious thoughts, the presence that made everything feel right. But somewhere along the way, comfort had turned into complacency. We'd stopped challenging each other. We'd stopped dreaming together. We'd become so focused on preserving what we had that we forgot to ask ourselves if what we had was still what we needed. I'd read once that people come into our lives for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. I'd always assumed she was my lifetime. The thought of her being just a season felt like a betrayal of everything we'd built together. Yet deep down, I knew. The person I was becoming couldn't live in the life we'd created. And the person she was becoming deserved someone who could show up fully, not someone staying out of fear and familiarity. The Questions That Changed Everything The turning point came during a solo trip I took to clear my head. Sitting on a beach thousands of miles away, watching the waves reshape the shoreline over and over, I finally asked myself the questions I'd been avoiding: Was I staying because I loved her, or because I was afraid of being alone? Was I holding on to who we were, or who we could actually be? If we met today, as the people we've become, would we still choose each other? The answers terrified me. Because they revealed a truth I'd spent months burying: sometimes love isn't enough. Sometimes two people can care deeply for each other and still be wrong for each other. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is let someone go so you can both find the versions of yourselves you've been suppressing.
By Ameer Moavia9 days ago in Humans
How Childhood Attachment Shapes Adult Heartbreak
I was twenty-eight years old, sitting in my therapist's office for the fifth time that month, crying over yet another failed relationship. This time it was Marcus—kind, stable, emotionally available Marcus—who I'd pushed away for reasons I couldn't explain. "Tell me about your parents," my therapist said gently, sliding the tissue box closer. I rolled my eyes. "Really? We're doing the whole 'blame the parents' thing?" She smiled softly. "I'm not asking you to blame anyone. I'm asking you to understand yourself." What followed was the most uncomfortable, enlightening conversation of my life. Because as I started talking about my childhood, patterns emerged that I'd never seen before. Patterns that explained every heartbreak, every self-sabotage, every time I'd chosen someone emotionally unavailable or run from someone who truly cared. My therapist was right. The blueprint for heartbreak had been drawn long before I ever fell in love. The First Language We Learn Attachment theory sounds complicated, but it's actually quite simple: the way our caregivers respond to us as children teaches us what to expect from relationships as adults. It's our first lesson in love, trust, and worthiness. My mother loved me—I never doubted that. But her love came with conditions. It appeared when I was good, obedient, successful. It vanished when I was needy, emotional, or imperfect. I learned early that love was something I had to earn, not something I inherently deserved. My father? He was there but absent, physically present but emotionally distant. He worked late, hid behind newspapers, and responded to my excitement or sadness with the same uncomfortable silence. I learned that expressing needs pushed people away. So I stopped expressing them. I didn't know it then, but I was learning a language—the language of anxious attachment. And I would speak it fluently in every romantic relationship I'd ever have. The Dance We Can't Stop Repeating My first serious relationship was with Jake. He was charming, unpredictable, and emotionally unavailable. Our relationship was a rollercoaster—intensely passionate one week, ice-cold the next. I never knew where I stood, and that uncertainty drove me crazy. But here's the twisted part: it also felt familiar. The push and pull, the constant need to prove myself, the anxiety of wondering if today would be a good day or a bad day—it all echoed my childhood. I was trying to earn Jake's consistent love the same way I'd tried to earn my mother's approval. When he'd pull away, I'd chase harder. When he'd show affection, I'd melt with relief. I was addicted to the cycle because somewhere deep inside, I believed this was what love looked like. After Jake came David, then Ryan, then Christopher. Different faces, same pattern. I was attracted to men who made me work for their attention, who kept me guessing, who made me feel like I had to be perfect to be loved. The Good Guy Problem Then I met Marcus. Sweet, consistent, emotionally intelligent Marcus. He called when he said he would. He communicated clearly. He didn't play games. He made me feel safe. And I couldn't stand it. Within three months, I was picking fights over nothing. I felt suffocated by his reliability. I started noticing flaws that weren't really flaws—he texted too much, he was too eager, his kindness felt boring. The anxiety I'd felt with the others was missing, and without it, I didn't recognize the feeling as love. I broke up with him on a Tuesday night, citing some vague excuse about "not being ready." He took it gracefully, which only made me feel worse. That's when I ended up in therapy, finally asking the question I should have asked years earlier: Why do I keep destroying the good things in my life? Unpacking the Invisible Suitcase My therapist explained that I had an anxious attachment style, likely formed by my inconsistent childhood experiences with love and attention. Children with anxious attachment grow into adults who:
By Ameer Moavia10 days ago in Families
The Emotional Impact of Growing Up Unloved
Nina was thirty-four when someone asked her what she needed, and she realized she didn't know how to answer. Her friend had noticed she looked exhausted—working sixty-hour weeks, managing everyone's problems, never saying no to anyone. "What do you need right now, Nina? How can I help?" Nina opened her mouth. Closed it. Felt panic rising. "I'm fine. I don't need anything." But that wasn't true. She was drowning. She just had no idea what she needed because no one had ever asked before. And more fundamentally, she'd learned by age seven that her needs didn't matter.
By Ameer Moavia10 days ago in Psyche
Why We Stay in Relationships That Break Us
The coffee had gone cold in my hands, but I didn't notice. I was too busy staring at my phone, waiting for it to light up with his name. It was our fifth anniversary, and he'd forgotten. Again. But this time, I told myself, would be different. This time, I wouldn't cry. This time, I wouldn't make excuses for him. I cried anyway. And made excuses. Again. That night, as I lay in bed alone—despite sharing it with someone—I asked myself the question I'd been avoiding for years: Why do I stay? The answer was more complicated than I wanted it to be. The Architecture of Staying We don't wake up one day and decide to accept less than we deserve. It happens gradually, like water wearing away stone. One compromise leads to another. One overlooked hurt becomes a pattern. Before we know it, we're living in a relationship that looks nothing like the one we dreamed of, yet we can't seem to find the door. I stayed because leaving felt impossible. Not because I couldn't physically walk away, but because I'd built my entire identity around being his partner. Who would I be without him? The question terrified me more than the reality of staying in something that was slowly crushing my spirit. My friends would ask, "Why don't you just leave?" As if it were that simple. As if love and pain didn't become so tangled together that you couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. The Sunk Cost of the Heart There's an economic principle called the sunk cost fallacy—the idea that we continue investing in something because of how much we've already invested, even when it's clear we're losing. We do this with money, with careers, and especially with relationships. I'd given him six years. Six years of my twenties, the years everyone said were supposed to be the best of my life. How could I walk away from that? Wouldn't leaving mean all that time, all that effort, all that love was wasted? I see now what I couldn't see then: staying doesn't honor the time you've invested. It just ensures you'll lose more. Every day I stayed, I was betting against myself. I was choosing the familiar ache over the unknown possibility of something better. And I was teaching my heart that its needs came second. The Illusion of Potential I didn't fall in love with who he was. I fell in love with who he could be. I saw his potential like a sculptor sees a masterpiece in a block of marble. I just had to chip away at the rough edges, be patient, love him harder, and eventually, he'd become the man I knew he could be. But people aren't projects. And love isn't a renovation. I spent years waiting for him to change, not realizing I was the one being transformed. I was becoming smaller, quieter, more accommodating. I was learning to read his moods like a weather forecast, adjusting my entire existence to avoid the storm. The person I was trying to create didn't exist. And the person I was becoming? I didn't recognize her anymore. Fear Dressed as Love The truth I didn't want to face was this: I wasn't staying because of love. I was staying because of fear. Fear that I'd never find anyone else. Fear that I was too damaged, too difficult, too much and not enough all at once. Fear that being alone would be worse than being with someone who made me feel lonely. Society had taught me well. It whispered that a bad relationship was better than no relationship. That I should be grateful someone wanted me at all. That if I just tried harder, loved better, gave more, things would improve. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed.
By Ameer Moavia11 days ago in Motivation
The Night I Finally Chose Myself Over Love
I remember the exact moment I realized I was disappearing. It was 2 a.m. on a Tuesday, and I was sitting on the bathroom floor with my phone in my hand, reading through our text messages for the hundredth time that week. I was trying to decode his words, searching for hidden meanings, wondering what I'd done wrong this time. My hands were shaking. My chest felt tight. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice whispered: This isn't love. This is survival. But I stayed anyway. For three more months, I stayed.
By Ameer Moavia11 days ago in Motivation
When Love Feels Like Anxiety
Caleb loved Iris so much he couldn't sleep. Not in the romantic, staying-up-talking-all-night way. In the lying-awake-at-3-a.m.-heart-racing-mind-spiraling way. In the checking-his-phone-every-five-minutes-when-she-didn't-text-back way. In the can't-eat-can't-focus-can't-function-unless-he-knew-she-still-loved-him way. People said he was in love. And maybe he was. But it didn't feel like the love depicted in movies or described in songs. It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, constantly terrified of falling. It felt like his entire nervous system was wired to one person, and if she withdrew even slightly, his whole world collapsed. It felt, more than anything, like anxiety. They'd been dating for eight months, and Caleb had never felt this way about anyone. He thought about Iris constantly. Needed to know where she was, who she was with, whether she was thinking about him. When they were together, he felt euphoric. When they were apart, he felt like he was suffocating. "You're so intense," Iris said one evening after he'd texted her fourteen times because she hadn't responded for two hours. "I was just at dinner with my sister. I'm allowed to not text you for a few hours." "I know. I'm sorry. I just... I worry when I don't hear from you." "Worry about what?" Caleb couldn't articulate it. That he worried she'd realize he wasn't enough. That she'd meet someone better. That she'd wake up one day and wonder why she was with him. That every moment she wasn't actively choosing him felt like she might be about to leave. "I don't know," he said instead. "I just love you a lot." But it didn't feel like love. It felt like drowning while pretending to swim.
By Ameer Moavia11 days ago in Psyche
The Woman Who Left First
Sophie broke up with Michael on their six-month anniversary. He'd planned a dinner. Bought flowers. Was clearly about to say something significant—maybe "I love you," maybe something about their future. She could see it in his eyes, the way he kept nervously touching the small box in his jacket pocket. And Sophie felt pure panic. Not because she didn't care about Michael. But because she cared too much. Because six months was exactly when people left. When they got close enough to see the real her and decided she wasn't worth staying for. When the fantasy dissolved and reality—messy, needy, imperfect Sophie—became too much. So she left first. "I don't think this is working," she said before he could open the box. "I think we want different things." Michael looked shattered. "What? Where is this coming from? I thought we were—" "We're not. I'm sorry. I have to go." She walked out of the restaurant, leaving Michael sitting alone with unopened flowers and whatever was in that box. She made it to her car before the tears came. This was the fourth relationship Sophie had ended exactly this way. Right when things got serious. Right before the other person could leave her. Right at the moment when staying would require trusting that someone might actually choose her permanently. Sophie's friends called her a "commitment-phobe" or "emotionally unavailable." Her therapist used words like "avoidant attachment" and "self-sabotage." But Sophie knew what she really was: terrified. Absolutely, bone-deep terrified of being abandoned. So terrified that she'd rather destroy good relationships herself than wait for the inevitable moment when the other person realized she wasn't enough and left. She was thirty-one years old, and she'd been running from abandonment her entire life. The problem was, in running from it, she'd made it happen over and over again. She'd become the abandoner to avoid being the abandoned. And it was destroying her.
By Ameer Moavia11 days ago in Motivation
