For the longest time, I approached love the way a child grips a fading balloon tight, afraid, desperate not to let go. I wasn’t taught that love could stay. That it could breathe. That it could grow stronger if given space.
No one had told me that love wasn’t a rationed thing. That it wasn’t some brittle object that could run out if shared too often. For years I clung to people with a kind of starving energy. I needed to be their everything. I wanted to be their favorite. And in doing so, I slowly became someone I did not recognize.
I think of that now when I reflect on Gollum, from The Lord of the Rings. How Sméagol started out ordinary, perhaps even kind. But his obsession with the One Ring his belief that possession equals love turned him into Gollum. A creature of fear and isolation, constantly talking to himself, paranoid and alone. I saw myself in that metaphor the first time I heard it on a podcast. The phrase Paranoid Gollum Energy or PGE stuck with me because it wasn’t just a joke. It was a mirror.
I had been that person in so many relationships afraid to be left alone, afraid that others’ love for someone else would diminish 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. But underneath it was panic.
This fear isn’t just personal. It is systemic. As A Course in Miracles describes, we are conditioned to form what it calls “special relationships.” We set one person apart, imagining that they will complete the lack we carry inside. We don’t relate from wholeness. We relate from need. And anything built on need carries the seed of destruction.
Sigmund Freud might call this the repetition compulsion the unconscious drive to recreate early attachment wounds in our adult lives. Freud believed that what remains unresolved doesn’t disappear. It just finds new people to attach itself to. And for me, that unresolved fear of abandonment disguised itself as love.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs places love and belonging right in the middle. These are not luxuries. They are not soft ideals. They are fundamental. But the mistake we make is to imagine that love must come in a certain form, from a single person, in a specific way. We forget that love, in its truest form, is expansive.
I didn’t know this growing up. I didn’t know this even in my early twenties. I had never really lived alone. And the idea of sitting with myself, without someone to orbit around, terrified me.
But the truth is clinging is not connection. Possession is not presence. As I grew older, I started to notice how my fear of being alone made me push people away. I thought I was keeping them close. But I was suffocating the very thing I wanted most.
Helen Schucman’s concept of the “special relationship” helped me reframe everything. My relationships weren’t failing because I was unlovable. They were failing because I had made love into a transaction. I had turned it into a currency that lost value when shared.
The idea that love is infinite was not something I grew up with. But the more I sit with it, the more I see its truth. Love is not a prize. It’s not a singular connection that must be hoarded. It is an ongoing movement toward wholeness. Toward recognition. Toward softness.
RuPaul says, “If you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love somebody else?” And for the first time in my life, I am beginning to understand what that means. Not as a meme. But as an embodied truth. You cannot give something you do not know how to hold for yourself.
I think of all the people I clung to. All the homes I tried to build inside others because I was too afraid to build one inside me. I want to hug that version of myself now. She was scared. She wanted love so badly she forgot she already had it.
There is no shame in that. There is only awareness.
And now that I know better, I am learning to breathe again. To love without possession. To let my people be free, and still trust that I belong.
