Are You Fed Up With Your Relationship Script but Not Sure How to Flip It?
When being let down stopped feeling good, I started doing this.
It’s the spring of 2014 and I’m ready for a relationship that’s going to stick. I’m in my mid thirties and I’ve had enough. I’m tired of the long list of emotionally unavailable men, experiences morphing slowly into a collection of sad, short stories and more exhausted by my desperate and painful responses to feeling abandoned.
To seal the deal, I grab the dried bouquet of flowers getting bored, sitting there for years in my grandmother’s red and golden vase on my century old sewing desk. They are the flowers I plucked with hope and passion in Jackson Heights, Queens, my ex boyfriend’s hood, several years back. I cremate them with my tough-love hands and as I toss the ashes of our long, complicated yet beautiful relationship out my Brooklyn window, I say Do Svidaniya! (farewell) to my ex-Russian lover.
Two days later, I’m in a cab cruising the streets of Williamsburg and pass a Brazilian bar calling me with its vibrant colors. Her name is Miss Favela and I want to go there. I’m with my friends and we’re on our way to another party, but they too like the looks of this yellow and green lady nestled cute on a street corner teeming with hipsters.
“Let’s flip a coin!”, I say. I flip and seal my fate. Miss Favela wins. Here I meet Rafael, a young, Brazilian musician and we hit it off fast. One week later, we’re in. One month later, I’m scared. All my old relationship fears are cruising to the surface — of being too much, of being too needy, of being abandoned.
I learned at a young age, like many of us do, it wasn’t always safe to depend on others emotionally. When I was seven years old, I was asked to read my brother a bedtime story to help him fall asleep. Sleep fell upon us both and as the night carried on in a bed too tiny to carry us both, I fell out crash landing directly on my collar bone, one of the more painful bones to break. I couldn’t stop crying. When attempts to soothe me failed to work, I heard loud and clear—Stop acting like a baby.
I learned to shut up.
But shutting up and shutting down was bringing me the thing I didn’t want: emotionally unavailable men. I attracted men who I couldn’t rely on so I didn’t have to be vulnerable with them or face the humiliation of being rejected in some of my most sensitive states.
But being ghosted was also humiliating and painful.
With Rafa, I decide to change the script. I had a bladder condition that was affecting me in more ways than one. Sex had become uncomfortable and I felt ashamed. Not only did I not want to tell him I paid a visit to the doctor for this, I didn’t want to tell him I was suffering at all.
But then, that wish. I decide being vulnerable, taking a risk by expressing myself in ways that were uncomfortable was better than living through another ghost story. That even if I was met by an unfavorable response, I would survive as I already had in my remote and recent past.
It was the first time I felt, in a such a powerful way, I needed to trust no matter what. And I don’t mean Rafael though feeling more safe than not with him, did help me take the leap. What I mean is I felt I needed to trust in the long game of life. That even if it didn’t work out with him, something eventually would work out with someone. I didn’t have the words for it at the time. I simply surrendered.
I trust for the sake of trusting.
Then, these two questions spontaneously arose.
They give me a sense of control, also something practical to work with. I commit to following through with the answer to №2 then and for eternity with all situations that scare me.
What would your scared self say or do in this situation?
Shut up, shut down, hide.
What would your loving self say or do? (Or—What would you do or say if you weren’t afraid?)
Speak my truth. Brave through the discomfort. Do what an emotionally available person would do.
We can complain all we want about our emotionally unavailable partners, but if you have a long list of them, chances are you’re emotionally unavailable too.
Let’s Talk About Fear, Baby
It took half a day to work up the courage to pick up the phone and tell my Brazilian man what was up, rehearsing in my head the script, how I would deliver it, picking up the phone, taking a deep breath, hanging up the phone. Back to rehearsing. Repeat ad nauseam until my head, a ton of bricks and heart, a mashed potato, I want to jump out of my skin.
F*ck it. Ring, ring.
The thing with doing uncomfortable things is no matter how long or hard you rehearse, it’s never going to be comfortable. That’s the point (and nature) of risk taking. I’m clumsy as hell when I express my needs or a new part of myself for the first time. I’m awkward as hell the twenty times after.
The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your action will be. -Dalai Lama
Over time it gets a little easier. There’s a road map now. You’ve survived, nothing too bad has happened except for a healthy dose of embarrassment. Disappointment, sure. But, that’s life and I’ve learned to laugh, especially at my clumsiness. The thing is if you’re going to do things that truly matter to you, you’re going to feel vulnerable. And with vulnerability, all those uncomfortable, physical sensations that accompany fear — heart palpitations, sweat, emergency trips to the bathroom, butterflies, dizziness. You may even feel on the verge of death.
Fear disturbs.
Relationships disturb.
But the symptoms of fear, don’t they sound curiously similar to the feelings of excitement?
What if we decided to view this disturbance as something positive?
What if we were to see fear or feeling vulnerable as a frenetic, dynamic, disturbing energy to be embraced in the service of transformation, as we stumble and fall and rise through the chaos of a yet to be defined new possibility?
What if your fears were the lost, fragmented, and scattered parts of yourself frantically trying to find their way back to wholeness?
That the fear you feel, instead of speaking of danger is, in fact, excitement for an unknown beginning. A sign that something is important.
Nothing taught me more about this than the stomach indigestion I experienced seven years ago after leaving behind my entire New York City life — two successful businesses, friends, a great apartment on a gut feeling as strong as the midday sun to come to Berlin, without any plan or vision in sight.
A year later, came the vision to make art something I’d never imagined before. Then came my stomach problems. Through painting it out and therapy, I understood a big part of my stomach upset was unchanneled energy. Inside of me lived a world bubbling with creative possibilities, balls of vibrating energy waiting to take new shape. My body didn’t know yet how to contain my own creative life force. I was too full and needed to get things out, but I wasn’t sure how. I also needed more structure.
And, I was scared. Scared of doing something I’d never done before.
Redefining fear
I found myself wondering — Could fear then actually be fragmented, scattered pieces of our power showing up in disguise as a disturbing energy (fear) moving us in the only way it knows how, with such force to reclaim these parts of ourselves we have hidden? Begging us to channel these parts into form or an action through our relationships and work, through the mundane, into wherever and however our unique being needs to express it?
What if fear and all the ways it might manifest — phobias, panic attacks, addictions, depression, illnesses, relationship problems, traumas… are experiences that arise not to scare us away from life…
But as a means to scare us back?!
Back into ourselves. Back into our dreams. Into our purpose. Into joy. Fully integrated and alive, with all our parts dancing in harmony.
Fear is the master provocateur, I thought.
Feel scared. But don’t run away.
My relationship with Rafael lasted four months, much shorter than the eternal love I imagined. I would spend time with him in his loft in Bushwick, filled with artists of all kinds, observing a way of life I had no clue I’d be immersed in four years later in Berlin.
We would drive, bebopping around Brooklyn in his rusty, red van filled with all kinds of instruments. He would compose songs for me and I, clumsily would put words together, trying my best to voice my fears. He received me the best he could. He was a young musician in the early stages of his career and music was his focus and passion. He burned for me too but it was a flame he couldn’t fully tend to and I didn’t feel satisfied with taking the back seat. He was, on some level, emotionally unavailable, but he never disappeared. With him, I was able to take some risks.
Two years later, about to make the move to Berlin, I’m in a playground with a good friend and like children, we begin to shout out our wishes to the universe. Again, “I want to be in a relationship that sticks!” As I hear myself say this, I realize I don’t believe this for a single second. A thunderbolt moment!
For the next five years, I would have experiences, intimacy in doses, that were the right amounts for me with men, who I could be myself with even for a brief moment.
Awakening
Living fully and joyfully comes hand in hand with tolerating uncomfortable feelings and everyday is a chance to choose. The good news — it doesn’t require taking radical action.
Sometimes, I find myself rolling around, like a hamster in her wheel, bored out of my mind. It shocks me how easy it is, no matter how creative I am, to get pulled into the grind. We are creatures of habit. Sometimes, I simply ask: What’s one small thing I can do differently today? Or: What’s one small action I can take, in a relationship or with my work that might, even slightly, push the envelope?
The energy I get from changing something minor is equally as shocking. In fact, change happens not just in the small moments but in the moments we think are unrelated to the things we want to change. The act of doing something nourishing for ourselves rippling out into all spheres of our lives, with unintended yet life changing consequences we discover only later as we connect the dots backward.
