Two things I know about you - Relationships and Rejection

 

There are two things I can guarantee about you.

You have hurt someone because you did not share their feelings for you.

Someone has hurt you, because they did not share your feelings for them.

It’s a curious duality full of unwritten rules and choices we make when we look for someone to spend our time with and be intimate with. Love is a very irrational emotion, so often we make these choices irrationally. Someone may be a complete rock for you, share your interests, have a compatible personality, be an objectively good influence on you – but you turn them down.  Afterwards, you may find someone totally unsuitable, lacking in many elements of what you may be looking for (or what you believe you are looking for) and suddenly, they are the clear and obvious choice.

This is where I struggle. The irrationality of emotions. It makes it very hard for someone like me to be able to process and move on from these instances. If you don’t know me in person, I am very Neurodivergent. I have an anxiety disorder, chronic depression and a form of complex PTSD. I see the world in a very left-brain mindset. I like the logic of the universe, being able to define and identify things is critical for me. I like to know *exactly* where I stand. Because of this, I also see relationships in quite a black and white way. Once I have began to feel something significant towards a person, I have to engage with that – but if that is met with rejection, it feels like a complete and utter rejection of me as a person, and my worth to others. This is an irrational response, but through years of therapy and self-study, I learned this was down to experiences I had as a child. It’s important for me to understand and know where I stand, because I have built internal defences – I have to make people approve of me.

This makes relationships quite difficult. There will be many of you that can understand and relate to what I’ve just disclosed. There will be many more who can’t. I feel like the Neurotypical ability of people to be able to operate within those “flux lines” between total approval and total rejection is something that comes naturally. It’s also the ability to bounce back and not attribute one person’s response to your entire perspective of self.

I have been in love with another, twice in my life. The first time, it was reciprocated. We were two lost souls, trying to find our place and finding another who felt the same. Two longing for approval and someone to give a damn about us. That’s what we had. But, when we began to realise that the approval and attention of the other person wasn’t enough to make us feel whole, we began to scrape against each other, eventually leading to us going our separate ways. As I suggested earlier, this was catastrophic for me. I spent years recovering from this blow and it affected me dramatically. I couldn’t go certain places, do certain things, and I still look at the music they listened to, the interests we shared with an element of painful sorrow. Over a decade later and it still stings, just that little bit. This other person, despite so much time and distance between us, still occasionally breaks the silence and asks for my help. They still value that support. Then, they ghost me again (lol)

The second time was more recent and it was not reciprocated. This person, however, was far more important to me beforehand and was one of my closest friends. The reaction was even more severe than the one prior. Once again, I shut down, I developed agoraphobia and sank to the lowest ebb in my life where I didn’t even really feel like I should keep going. I had two jobs and I lost them both. The emotional reactions I had were so severe, so intense that they would make me vomit, feel physical pain, or even lose consciousness. That’s when I began to look at the root causes of why I have these reactions. I worked for two years with a wonderful therapist called Emma, who helped me explore the origin of my problems and we worked to rebuild better foundations to be able to tackle the inevitable next rejection. It wasn’t just relationships. It was jobs, social events, anything that you can be turned down from.

As I said at the start, you can be the “Joe” in those situations, or you can be the other person. You may not realise it, but you can have a huge emotional anchor over others. For those of you who find yourself in the other camp more often, having to reject the attention of others, take that moment to consider how the other may be affected – and be kind, gentle and empathetic. They may react in ways you find confusing or counter to their personality. We are human beings, all big masses of emotions, and we all carry our wounds differently. I never hold any ill will to those who cause me pain in that way; on the contrary, I love and value them as much as I ever did. Sometimes, even more so. We are all in this great game together.

You can reject others. Others can reject you. This is life.

But you can never, ever, reject yourself.