Sarah asked me what I wanted from her. I couldn’t put it into words. I just wrung my hands and felt stupid and rejected. Today I got it.
I wanted to feel like you loved me like family and you would deliberately seek out my company instead of rejecting me for people who are better than me.
In no way shape or form am I ever going to take up a majority of Jenny’s life. She’s married. She has kids. She lives in a different country. But when she gets the chance to be in my company she turns and faces me fully and wants to hear me talk and she wants to tell me about herself. She doesn’t go in her room with her partner after agreeing to see me and then shut the door.
There are people in this world who not only love me, they act like they love me. That’s what I wanted. I wanted Sarah to act like she loved me instead of acting like I was a path to a highly subsidized trip to Disneyland.
In the future when people treat me like I am an atm I need to stop acting like that is a reflection of me not working hard enough to earn their love.
Maybe they aren’t worth the effort.
This is interesting stuff. I have a very small family (only child, my mom has one sister, my stepmom’s family didn’t think of us as related, my grandmother was an only child), and so I’ve missed out on a lot of this. But I also have complicated/self-damaging beliefs about those things not being for me. Having been given away when I was born makes it easy for me to feel like I’m not ever really going to be loved.
*hug*