Don’t fall in love with someone you have never met: the unraveling
The dice were cast; no backtracking, no more making excuses for him that had only lead to self-inflicted wounds. He wasn’t worth those to begin with.
I was wondering if closing off that path would make me feel remorseful or anxious. Instead, I felt massively relieved as soon as I dropped the letter at the post office, as if things were finally “right how they’re meant to be”: it was insanely exhausting to constantly reinterpret and revision his actions; does this mean it’s TRULY over? Not yet? Are you maybe kinda into me but not enough to actually put some effort in, or have you moved on already?
The energy I spent on deciphering both his words, actions and their absence could charge a Tesla car for several decades.
I felt incredibly free putting a firm stop to it.
No more fighting battles lost upfront, no more chasing pipe dreams.
I can do better.
What helped was doing very well in the lab, enjoying my glioblastoma project, and being surrounded by people who were treating me more kindly (whatever their motivation) than many of the people I had known my entire life, not to mention New Haven.
My confidence was rising, I was gradually seeing my own value without needing external validation for every single positive thought about myself (at that time, I believed there’s something fundamentally wrong with me; I’ve since realised that most children from absurdly dysfunctional families and most women with absent fathers suffer from some version of this.)
I didn’t expect that New Haven would be in any way bothered by the loss of the connection. In fact, I assumed he may be relieved that I finally did what he for some reason didn’t have the guts to do, and imagined he will probably not even notice the absence of my daily emails in his mailbox when he comes back from vacation. My “presence” made no difference in his life.
So I was extremely surprised when on Monday the following week I found an email from him in my medschool inbox (I must have forgotten I gave him that email address; I blocked him on my personal email.)
He wrote a paragraph about how he tried to email me while on vacation but all his emails bounced back, and that he doesn’t have any other way of contacting me to talk (maybe you should have asked me for my cell number after I told you I bought one? Just sayin’) “Let me know where I can write to you”.
I deleted it without responding.
He lent me two medical books during the early weeks of our long-distance contact by having his brother drop those off (I never asked him for it but didn’t mind; I went through the books to see what parts he underscored and what notes he wrote). As a part of purging him out of my life I asked my sister to return those to his brother once I decided to cut it off.
So on Tuesday I received yet another email in my medschool inbox: his brother emailed him that my sister gave him the books back per his request. ”I don’t know anything about that?” He added that he guesses his emails didn’t bounce back due to a technical problem after all, and that Skype is also apparently blocked. “I’ll take it as it is, but I personally prefer a different approach.”
I was tempted to ignore the email, which in hindsight I absolutely should have, but I responded with “check your mailbox”.
For reasons I don’t remember, the email exchanges escalated from there (he found the letter) and I ended up crying pretty much after every single email he sent.
I don’t remember anymore what that pile of crap consisted of, but the highlights included saying how ungrateful I am “after everything he has done for me” (WTF?!?) to which I merely said “I don’t owe you anything”.
He also said he isn’t sorry I ended it but that he has “learnt his lesson not to let people he doesn’t know at all too close” (what the actual F?!?), for which I ended up apologizing like a complete idiot.
“I feel like a fool, I tried to email you from a tiny café in Death Valley that had an internet connections and couldn’t figure out why it’s all bouncing back.”
The last thing I expected from him while on vacation was to email me, and wondered what was so important he needed to share while off? (He went on a vacation with three other people, one of them a woman, which I wasn’t sure what that meant.)
“What was in those emails?”
“ I wrote to you about what we’re up to”.
Oh, so you expected me to invest my time into reading what you’re doing with people I know absolutely nothing about, and who have no idea I exist.
He wasn’t trying to connect with me. He was missing his audience; the loud claps and enthusiastic cheers assuring him that his own life is exceptional and terribly exciting. He was missing an on-demand cheerleader, not me.
Had I received those emails, I would have ended it up just the same.
I spelled out that my decision to put this to rest isn’t stemming from me not caring, but rather from going through a challenging period myself; that there is a very realistic chance I would end up lashing out and hurting him given his behavior utterly incompatible with my needs, every word of which was absolutely true. There was no reason to hurt him because he’s not capable of meeting my needs.
Of note, he never asked what those challenges I was describing were.
People always assume that letting someone go must stem from not caring enough for the other person. It can come from a very different place; one where you do care and have genuine feelings, but also rationally know that you both need someone completely different to have a chance at being happy.
He responded with something along the lines of “I never thought that this would work anyway”.
“So… if you knew this wasn’t going to work out, you just took advantage of me then?”
“I refuse to talk like this! So, you lied to me when you said you’d give me time and patience?”
“I’d give you all the time and patience in the world, because I really like you, but I don’t think that feeling is mutual.”
“It’s not mutual.”
I figured.
That was the email I finally didn’t respond to.
There was nothing left to say.
Instead of having an ounce of empathy that it’s not always about him and that he’s not the only one who is facing personal challenges and problems, he was acting pathetically butt-hurt.
It bothered me endlessly: the reality was he was in fact incredibly lucky, living a ridiculously privileged life, a part of which he chose to spend in self-pithy instead of working on his issues.
Instead of taking responsibility, he expected a 22 year student to be his muse, cheerleader, lover and a therapist; always there, always available, always full of compassion ready to deliver instant emotional support on demand, while he himself was not prepared to even ask what’s going on with me.
An immature emotional leech that ultimately cares only for himself. Even I, the person he chose to play “Nevermets” with because he’d get all this with the least effort and investment, was able to figure it out.
So that was it. Finally the bitter end.
I was sad and heartbroken (again) — the usual emotional state following any interaction with him. I went to buy a lunch at the cafeteria and a “daily special” was a hot apple pie with whipped cream. I normally don’t buy deserts, but decided to medicate my sadness with the pie.
As I sat down, an elderly manicured lady in an expensive suit joined me at my table. Looking at my white coat, she asked: “are you a doctor here?”
I explained that I’m a visiting medical student completing a research project over the summer.
She proceeded to tell me about her seriously ill daughter who was wheelchair bound due to an autoimmune disease and apparently has run out of treatment options. They were meeting with her team that afternoon to decide the next steps. It was rather heartbreaking.
There was something ‘grounding’ about that story: there is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting love and a relationship, and I have no reason to be embarrassed or apologetic that I was emotional and deeply sad when it didn’t work out with someone I liked. My emotions were perfectly legitimate and appropriate.
On the other hand, it’s also a problem that has a solution (moving on), while people of the world face far more devastating challenges for which absolutely no options are offered. It’s good to keep that mind while not invalidating my desires and what is true to me.
As I was walking back from the cafeteria with the sun stroking my back as if to say “it’s going to be OK”, I called my trusted friend back home and told him the story about the wheel-chair bound woman and asked him to remind me of it by saying ‘hot apple pie’ whenever he gets a feeling that I’m too absorbed in solvable problems.
In hindsight, I realize that by being immersed in studies, living my life from exam to exam, medical book to medical book for years and never having had a real chance to be independent, I never got a chance to figure out who I really am to grow emotionally. I was deeply uncomfortable with the ‘put and and shut up’ culture of my medical schools where abuse was rampant, rendering me constantly stressed, mildly depressed, lonely and anxious. ‘Nevermetting’ with New Haven was like a beacon of light, proving that there can be more to life that this; there still were mountain left to climb, rivers to cross and planets that bear no name yet to discover.
Yet the moment my happiness became dependent exclusively on his actions, the moment I started waiting for him and adjusting all aspects of myself I could think of to fit the mould I thought he expects, I, as a person, was gone.
Now, in a place thousand of miles away from anything I know and with no support network, it was completely up to me to build myself out of all of this.
I cried in my bed that night for good thirty minutes, crushed by the feeling of a profound loss.
The person I had lost was me.
My room mate was away for a couple of days, and being completely alone in the big house after the conversation with New Haven was stirring up extreme anxiety and restlessness in me.
I had no coping skills whatsoever; I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, able to function.
I opened her freezer, poured a small glass of vodka I swallowed on the spot (it burnt my throat and made my eyes water), grabbed the old cat, and with my head spinning went to sleep snuggled with a purring feline that seemed not to judge me.
