Falling In and Out of Love
June 26, 2023
I have a problem. I fall in love with everything so quickly and fall out of love with it just as fast. Maybe it is my undiagnosed ADHD. Maybe it is the ADHD that runs in my family, so that is what has been modeled to me. Maybe I just don’t know myself that well. Or maybe there are too many things I want to try and not enough hours in the day.
I love to tell stories. This has been something I have loved for a long time. I love the art of story telling because it can move you or transport you to another place or time. I love storytelling through music and art, i love it though books and movies, I love consuming it and I love creating it. I think I saw one two many movies based on a young woman who wrote in her diary, growing up, because I have journal after journal filled with my story. There are notebooks filled with stories I have half written and bookshelves of books I have half read.
I love making things. I love painting and sculpting and drawing. I love the way a finished piece feels when you show it to someone you love. I love the pride that comes from working on a piece for a long time and it finally looks the way you had envisioned. I is such a sweet reward to have something to show for the work that you have put into something. From the sketches and the color matching and practice over the years – this is how you show that it has been worth it.
I love psychology. I love learning about peoples minds and the way that they work, why they think the way they do, the way they feel the way they do, the way things make them feel, etc. I love unpacking things with people and hearing what they have been through. I love the enneagram and the way it helps people find themselves and lean into learning more about why they are the way they are. I think it is so fascinating.
Is this all because of fear?
I fear forgetting my life and my loved ones and I fear that I will be forgotten. This is something that I discovered when I was on one of my very first dates ever ( and with my now husband ) when we went to go see the movie Wall-E. If you have yet to see the movie, it is about a robot that is the last surviving robot on earth that was left to clean up the mess the humans left behind so that they can move back to earth once it is clean. Spoiler alert, it was so awful that the robots all died except one and the humans lived on a space cruise for hundreds of years ( 700 to be exact ). Everything is automated and there is a robot for everything, so no one has to work or even think in this space cruise, but every once in a while, it is scheduled to send out robots to go to earth and check for signs of life. Here is when Eve comes in. Wall-E falls in love with Eve instantly and, long story short, Wall-E presents Eve with his new discovery, which happens to be a plant, and she shuts down. He does everything he can to save her, including going to space with her, back to the ship, and somehow ( I cannot quite remember, it has been a moment since I have seen the movie last ) Wall-E gets hurt and looses his memory. My poor little 13 year old heart was already raging, but seeing Eve get forgotten by the one that she loves was too much for me! I was sitting there, holding my sweet boyfriends hand and trying not to let him see the tear rolling down my cheeks at the thought of him ever forgetting me. ( spoiler alert: he didn’t forget me, he actually pined over me the whole time I was pining over him. We just show it very differently. I posted Taylor Swift lyrics as my Facebook status and he avoided me. To each their own. )
I fear the blank canvas. I often talk about “the blank canvas effect” and how crippling it is. Everything is so overwhelming before you begin. The thought of getting everything out and then possibly becoming overwhelmed with the process and scratching everything and it having been a waste of time is so scary to me. ( yet I do not fear that spending time scrolling through instagram is a waste of time while I am entranced, but that is a whole other issue I am working to unpack. ) In college, I had quite a few professors that used the “tough love” approach where they tell you you can do better and they expect you to chase after that. They tell you that they were farther along at your age and don’t expect you to have a falling-behind complex. Well, hate to break it to you, but I do not function that way. It made me fear the perfectionism in me. It made me not want to begin because it was not going to be good enough, or even as good as my classmates, so why would I even bother? It made me clam up and not even want to go to my classes because it was so debilitating. ( Granted, I was hardly sleeping and dealing with some pretty heavy depression and bad boyfriends, but that for sure was not helping. )
I fear not being good at my classes. I would love to take more classes and learn more about psychology. In college I read the books cover to cover and kept them so that I could reference them later. I dove into my studies when it came to the human mind and I was excited for my classes. But I have never been a good student. Even when I was reading the books and taking as many notes has my hands would let me, I did not test well, and therefore did not do very well in my classes. Tests are overwhelming and it is hard to regurgitate the information the way that they want you to in a testing environment. It feels as though it is not worth the time and the money that is involved if I am not going to test well, because what is the point if I do not test well? Why would I work on something without an end goal?
I fall in and out of love with things, but is it because I am letting fear rule my life? What would it be like if I took back control?
