For a long time, I held on to love the way a child grips a balloon that’s losing air: tight, scared, desperate to keep it. Nobody taught me that love could stay, breathe, and grow stronger with space. Nobody told me it could be shared without running out. For years I clung to people with a starving kind of energy. I needed to be their everything and their favorite, and slowly I turned into someone I didn’t recognize. I think about Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. Sméagol started out ordinary, maybe even kind, and his obsession with the One Ring, his belief that owning something is the same as loving it, turned him into Gollum, a frightened, isolated creature who talks to himself and trusts no one. I first heard the phrase “Paranoid Gollum Energy” on a podcast, and it stuck with me because I recognized myself in it. In so many relationships I was afraid of being left alone, afraid that someone’s love for another person would take away from what they felt for me. I became emotionally possessive. I poured my fears into carefully written texts and constant check-ins. My fear looked like affection, with panic underneath.
This fear is also bigger than me. A Course in Miracles, scribed by Helen Schucman, describes what it calls “special relationships,” where we set one person apart and expect them to fill the emptiness we carry. When we relate from need, what we build carries the seed of its own destruction. Sigmund Freud called something similar the repetition compulsion, the unconscious drive to recreate early wounds in adult life. He believed that what stays unresolved finds new people to attach to, and my unresolved fear of abandonment dressed itself up as love. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs puts love and belonging in the middle, as basic needs. Our mistake is believing love has to come in one form, from one person, in one way. Love is much wider than that. I didn’t know this growing up, or even in my early twenties. I had never really lived alone, and the idea of sitting with myself, without someone to orbit, terrified me. As I got older, I noticed that my fear of being alone pushed people away. I thought I was keeping them close, and I was suffocating the thing I wanted most. Schucman’s idea of the special relationship helped me see it differently. My relationships kept failing because I had turned love into a transaction, a currency that lost value whenever it was shared.
I grew up believing love was limited, and the more I sit with the idea that it’s infinite, the truer it feels. Love keeps moving toward wholeness, toward recognition, toward softness. RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?” For the first time, I understand that in my body. You can’t give someone what you don’t know how to hold for yourself. I think about all the people I clung to, all the homes I tried to build inside other people because I was too scared to build one inside myself. I want to hug that version of me. She was scared, and she wanted love so badly she forgot she already had it. I feel no shame about her, only awareness.
Now I’m older, I live alone, and I’m practically single. I don’t feel the need to fake who I am anymore. I ride the bus home from the lab by myself, and it’s okay. It’s okay to be alone some of the time, or all of the time. I’m learning to breathe again, to love without possessing, and to let my people be free while I trust that I still belong.
