LoveBomber
“Navel-gazing is not for the faint of heart. The risk of honest self-appraisal requires bravery. To place our flawed selves in the context of this magnificent, broken world is the opposite of narcissism, which is building a self-image that pleases you.”
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
He zeroed in on me, squinting his eyes, right eye squeezed tightly shut. A wink held with intention. His mouth watering, heart thumping, pupils dilated, precision and focus right on the bullseye-- the center target must have been somewhere on my chest. He knew how to aim; he knew what he was doing. This guy, he knew how to hunt. But this wasn’t some duck hunt. It was me he was after. He sat down, looked at me in the eye and said, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.
I know. I’d roll my eyes, too. If I’d had a water glass in my hand, I’d have raised it to my lips, mid-sip, spitting it out, a watery projectile straight at his face. My intuition, my inner bullshit meter in the red. I’d laugh, sort of cackle-like.
You’re full of shit, I’d say.
But I wasn’t so quick-witted. Instead, my eyes narrowed, chucking that one line at him. You know the one.
I bet you say that to all the girls.
He laughed. He then looked both ways like he was crossing the street into this seductive, enticing territory that was me. No, he said.
I don’t.
I narrowed my eyes. But still, somehow--believed him.
When he later told me I was home, I believed him. When he told me I was his everything, I believed him too. When he would send a message in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday: Amanda Lynn Blackwell, I love you. I believed him. I screenshot it for safekeeping. When he had tears in his eyes the first time we parted ways, returning to his work-life on the mainland, the start of our intermittent long-distance relationship- I believed in his sincerity. When he told me I was everything he ever wanted, his dream girl, I believed that too. When told me he’s got me, and I’m safe, and if I’m ever scared of the carpet being pulled from beneath me, he’d say, that rug is gorilla glued to the floor, babe. I believed him.
Love bombing is a modern and millennial term coined for the mostly avoidant types, the kind that both ache for love but tragically want nothing to do with it. Love bombing is defined as the action or practice of lavishing someone with attention or affection in order to influence or manipulate. Love bombers are sort of a love vampire, where they use love as both the goal and the weapon. They do not give out of virtue; they give with condition where they can ultimately receive. They manipulate and create that giddy, honeymoon-like dynamic as a means of self-fulfilling, erroneous and heedless intentions. They give a large amount of investment and attentiveness in the beginning stages, where they do and say things a few steps ahead of what should be a healthy relationship unfolding. Instead of truly honoring where you and the relationship stand, they grab your hand and thrust you into the deep end before realizing the bottom is untouchable. It is all in the pursuit of a stage of connection that is not realistic or true. Essentially it’s a short cut. A love hack. If I can get you to love me quickly, I can believe I’m worth something. If I can get you to fall in love with me, then I’ll feel better about myself. The caveat is—love bombers are not malicious. They are deeply wounded but dismally unconscious of it.
How often do we jump into relationships with an almost panicky sense of urgency? It’s seemingly difficult to pump the breaks when the whirlwind feels so good. It’s a special kind of exhilarating. It’s satiating. It feels easy. It feels right. However there’s still that voice inside, often a notch above muted, a quiet whisper that says slow down. Like an alcoholic who can’t have just one drink, those who ache for love will jump into it head-first, despite the much-too-quiet nudge from intuition.
I have that voice within me, the whispering kind, the one nagging me when I’m driving too fast. I choose not to listen. The faster I go, the sooner I’ll reach this proverbial destination of safety, protection, and validation. Pedal to the metal. What’s the speed limit, anyway? Why follow the rules when you can break them?
In L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, anyone who enters the lavish and palatial Emerald City is forced to wear emerald glasses. They are demanded into this law of the land under the premise of protection. They are told that these goggles protect them from the blinding emerald and brightness of the city, its grandiosity being too dangerous to the naked eye. The reality of it is the green goggles do not protect, but they magnify. They make the ordinary seem extraordinary. A false sense of perception in every sense of the word. We often see through a warped lens that is not always real or true.
It’s what love does. It’s reciprocated on both sides. No one is a victim here. We all have our heads in the clouds. We believe the other can do no wrong in those first few months, and there’s seemingly no end in sight. We wave these One-Way Tickets to Forever in the air. We plan our futures that revolve around the relationship. The perfection of it is surely built to last. Surely. In turn, we get down on our knees, offering a sense of worship, where we put our partner on a pedestal that no single human can live up to. As Melissa Febos writes in her memoir Abandon Me, “Worship is a tricky gift. It is a love meant for gods, not humans. We idolize our objects of worship and no human can meet those expectations.” Our brains are completely hijacked with hormones and chemicals that essentially make our brain woozy with affection. The honeymoon stage is neurological-- but eventually these chemicals fade. One or both parties will shift, realizing that the person we fell in love with is a projected illusion-- a mirage on a barren highway between Vegas and Barstow. A hallucination that we eventually wake up to. The vision of our lover will eventually come into focus, where textures and pores and imperfections are more visible than they were before. It is quite jarring to examine, this flawed humanness we all harbor, especially when it comes to the person you fell in love with. We ask “what happened to him or her?”, “they changed, they aren’t the person I fell in love with”. The truth is, they have been there all along. The green goggles with guarantee, will eventually fall away.
Some of us run the other direction at the first sign of flaw or wounding. My story is no different.
I, however, am not the one who did the running.
I felt the shift. I felt it immediately. It was swift-- it knocked the air right out of me.
As his steady stream of love bombing began to quiet, his green goggles falling on the floor by my feet, I tapped my ear as if I was tapping a vein. More I whispered, mirroring the addict. I not only craved his affirmations, I needed them. Withdrawal had set in. Without these words, I knew where it was headed. Inaudibly, as his words slipped, I knew he had too.
Uncle Skip took one look at me and said, What happened darling? I smiled a half smile, my mouth leaving my teeth protected, as if they were the gate keeper of these big emotions I was in no place to deal with. Composure is a stealthy virtue-- if only we could all unravel at the times we most need to.
When someone looks at me and can instantly identify something is amiss, it’s subliminal permission to come undone in an instant. The loaded question of, What’s wrong? when I am feeling tender is the ultimate catalyst. The breaking of the emotional damn, the floodgates. Whats wrong? is the most compassionate, yet sticky thing a person can ask when I’m losing grip on my own fragile neuroses.
I looked away and lifted my eyes to the ceiling, blinked a few times, as if that would stop the water from gushing out of my eyelids. No words were exchanged, but they didn’t need to be.
Uncle Skip is a kind, generous, thoughtful man. Deeply spiritual, he has spent his lifetime in the service of others. During the winter, when North swell energy makes its way into Hanalei Bay, I see him every Tuesday and Thursday teaching Thai Chi to the community. Often times he’ll be standing there in the salt water mist, coaxing the energy this way and that, and his sense of serenity can be felt hundreds of yards away. He’s the kind of man that sees you. Intimidating being seen like that, where I sometimes wish I could run from the people who can peer into my soul with a single glance. But I’m drawn towards Skip-- as were his good friends Alan Watts and the Dalai Lama.
A few months before, Skip had asked me a similar knowing and intuitive question, but under entirely different circumstances. I was falling in love. Who did you meet? he asked, with one look at me. Is it that obvious? I said, my eyes peering out from under my batting eyelashes. I gushed, I indulged, returning his gaze with hopeful eyes. The kind that new love gives. Puppy-like. He knew before I could open my mouth. I was love-drunk. Chemically and hormonally-- hijacked.
Because falling for him? That part was easy.
I pick him up at the airport for the first time after his few-week work stint. I meet him at the curb, and my heart spills into my belly. He’s standing there, and I zero in on him as if he’s the only person standing in this tropical airport terminal. His dark shades, his salt and pepper five-o-clock shadow, his casual coolness that makes him look both broody and alluring, and I wonder how it’s fair that a man could be this good-looking. I sharply suck in a pile of air between my front teeth, hold it in, and spew it out as I push open the driver’s side door. I’m pulled towards him like he’s yanking on an invisible rope tethered between us, where he drops his surfboard he carries in his hand and kisses me like we are anywhere but the airport. With tender urgency. Not the kind where he wants to throw me into a bedroom, but the kind that asks, Where have you been all my life?
He gets into my car and grabs my hand. I roll the windows down and tell him, My air conditioning broke and I’m sorry but don’t worry, I’ll drive fast. Both of us were oozing under a layer of humidity that dampened our necks and glistened our faces, but he didn’t flinch at my minor shortcoming. He tells me I will fix it. He follows it with I got you, and I melt because it’s like rubbing a sweet, soothing salve onto all my wounds. It’s the words I ache to hear. That someone has got me. I’m not so sure if I wanted him to fix my car or fix the parts of me that only he could reach.
He squeezes my hand as I smile over at him.
I confess: You know, I’m really just a mess when it comes down to it.
I love your mess, he says.
I’m not so sure about that, I counter.
He looks at me dead pan, a serious look in his eye. Yes. He says. I’m sure.
He breaks up the palpable electricity between us, and he laughs. He mentions something about kicking an hour glass over on its side and time stopping. My eyes are wide as I look at him, that warm Hawaiian air kissing my face. Who’s the writer here? I say.
He laughs again.
You can have it, he says. You can have it all.
After the relationship dismantled, I again saw Skip as my wounds were gaping, tears spilling over. I couldn’t hide, especially from Skip.
Come over tomorrow, he said. We’ll talk.
By talk, I didn’t assume that Skip had intended on giving me some healing work. His hands, they are meant for healing-- he has healed hundreds and thousands of people. With his background in psychotherapy, somatics, acupuncture and energy work, he knows the body-- moreso the emotional body. For some reason, as if by miracle, he knew I didn’t deserve what had transpired between me and this man. I practically jumped on his table with the prospect of feeling better.
Look-- it’s me we are talking about. I’m my favorite wounded bird to tend to. I’ll do anything to fix me.
He tapped my liver and asked me if I did that every day.
What, I asked.
Drink.
I hadn’t had a drink in weeks.
Well, that can only mean one other thing: you feel so deeply, he said.
No kidding, Skip.
These feelings, they nestled into my organs.
It is said that in Traditional Chinese Medicine, feelings of anger, resentment, bitterness and depression are associated with the liver. The body will swallow them whole without giving the system an opportunity to chew. What the emotional body refuses, the physical body will eventually absorb. It’s as if this body, my body, has an engrained protective mechanism and made the impermissible decision to avoid then consume-- instead of feel.
Skip tapped my liver, releasing a flow of emotion. My eyes began to water, and I’m slowly engulfed with this burning rage and weighty resentment. My body no longer needed to suppress for the sake of protective mechanism. I was giving it permission to be consumed by the breaking down and the flux of feeling that followed. My body, it’s here to tell me. My body, it’s here to teach me.
These lessons often arrive on a carriage pulled by our lovers, with these feelings sitting in the passenger seat. They keep us captive; they nestle themselves inside our organs and tissues until we learn from them. These lessons will keep calling until I answer. I glance out my window, and there they are. They wait in a blacked-out SUV parked outside my house. They are annoyingly patient and relentlessly persistent. They follow me like a shadow, running red lights, on my tail, cannot be avoided. They don’t care how fast I drive to get away—they will always catch up. They won’t leave until they have taught me exactly what I need to know.
In relationships we are told not to fall in love too quickly. We are told to use discretion, to take things slow, to let people reveal themselves to us over a long period of time. It takes patience; it takes paying attention. It’s an impossible task at times: going against predisposition to rush into safety, into love. Like many little girls, I was taught that a man could save me. Rupunzel in her castle, Cinderella and her shoe, Sleeping Beauty and her nap. That being in relationship as a woman is one of the most poignant means to define us and our worth—providing the premise of both safety and purpose. Of what it means to be rescued. Love, it is escapism. Love, it is our cure. Or so I was led to believe.
He told me he was falling in love with me at 2 in the morning, on a Saturday. We had both been tossing and turning into the late hours of the night, a sense of vigilance that comes when sharing a bed with someone new. The tropical, sporadic rain pitter pattering on the roof, moonlight seeping through the windows. My head on his chest, listening to his breathing. My hair, still damp and splayed over my shoulders, salt lingering on my skin. Contentment in its truest sense. I soak it in. He then whispers words I had no expectation to hear. I’m falling in love with you, he says. He sliced the silence in half, a sharp knife that was a 6-word sentence. His words hung in the air as thick as the summer heat. I grabbed them and held them close. I wanted to suffocate them.
What, I said.
He pushes my crinkled, sun-soaked hair away from my face, his voice becoming louder, slightly raspy. I’m falling in love with you, he repeats. My eyes penetrate his, darting back and forth, trying to detect any ounce of hesitation. I smile. Are you sure, I ask.
Yes. I’m sure.
I gave over to love in that minute. I had a choice. We always have a choice, don’t we? Do I? Don’t I? This path, or that path? It’s simple, really. Love is always a choice. I wish this impulse to give myself over to him was for my greatest good. I wish this inclination came from outside myself, but it was myself. The part of me that’s insatiable. The part that longs to curb this hunger for love’s redemption. I allowed myself, in that moment of choice, to sink my teeth into him. To gnaw on this rind of affection, with the consequences of these choices hovering, blurry in the periphery—then ignored and thrown out the window for the vultures to pick at.
I chose to succumb to this man, these feelings, while still knowing in the back of my mind that there was a black hole of information I wasn’t aware of. There was still too much I didn’t know about him.
How can you really love someone you barely know? How can you really love someone without knowing the depths of them? Are we really just clinging onto hope and calling it love? Perhaps that’s my problem because I don’t know what that means, what love means really—other than the fact that it typically leaves me gutted. He had hooked me by his index finger inside my left cheek. It’s as if I’ve hopped onto this proverbial boat that is him, enticed by his sweet words, where I willingly hand him a knife and casually ask him to gut me. In a sense, he hooked me, he gutted me. One after the other, all the same. It’s all just fishing-- a silly little game of catch and release.
He had dunked that hook in gooey honey, his words sugar-coated and sweet to the taste. Later after the sweetness dissolved on my tongue, all that was left was the taste of blood in my mouth.
All of us carry small satchels of insatiable wounds, yet all of us long for love and connection. Love and connection, they are essential for our survival. We are all brought into this world needing connection to stay alive, and love to carry us through. Dr. Gabor Mate says that, “All mammals are predisposed with an expectation of unconditional loving acceptance.” Meaning that these needs aren’t only an essential part of our nature, but expected.
There’s something so fascinating with relationships, where I’ve noticed love and connection is easier for some, harder for others. Some of us are more wounded, some of us more secure. It’s been hard and especially wounding for me, and there’s no turning away from that truth. I’ll own that. I’ve witnessed my own barriers that hold me captive, have also observed it mirrored in others. I find solace in my awareness of my own insatiable wounds. Awareness of this bottomless pit that I don’t turn a blind eye to. Inside me there’s a dog who doesn’t know how to stop eating when it’s satisfied, how it will gorge and eat itself to death. I gorge on love, but the kind with unhealthy attachment. I hunger for the wrong type of man.
Attachment Theory is a framework that addresses the bond between caregiver and child, and how that can become mirrored in adult relationships. It plays a prominent role in how we trust one another, in how we manage conflict, how we handle intimacy, how much self-awareness we have and most importantly, who we decide to be in relationship with. John Bowlby devoted his life’s work to research on Attachment, finding that experiences in childhood influence the development and behavior into adulthood. Making strong and emotional bonds is a basic component to human nature. When there is a fracture or severance in these bonds in the early stages of development, attachment trauma takes route. These traumas have a significant effect on us as we move into adulthood, and determine how we approach our relationships.
Mary Ainsworth was responsible for the groundbreaking “Strange Situation” study, where she observed children from 12-18 months and how they responded to separation. Her observations were fascinating. The mother, child and stranger are introduced, separated, and then reunited, characterizing 3 main attachment types that each one of us falls into: secure, anxious, and avoidant.
Those with secure attachments had interacted with the stranger when the mother left, some visibly upset when the mother leaves, however are happy to be reunited with the mother upon her return. Those with secure attachments are confident that the caregiver is available and will return. The mother is responsive to the child’s needs. In adulthood, Secure attachments find it easy to get close to others and are comfortable depending on them, where they don’t wrestle with their worries about abandonment, or on the contrary, someone getting too close to them.
The children with anxious attachments showed distress before the separation and were especially clingy and difficult to comfort upon the mother’s return. The baby is happy to see its mother but simultaneously angry, where the child fails to exhibit any feelings of safety and security. Adults with anxious attachments fear abandonment, are hyper-vigilant and worry often that their partner will leave them. They desire closeness, especially if it is denied. They can sometimes feel incomplete on their own, and they consistently feel as if something is wrong with them.
Avoidant attachments show little engagement with the mother to begin with, and after she leaves the room, they avoid the mother following her return. Upon further dissection of the study, the children with avoidant tendencies may externally show a sense of indifference; however, their biology says otherwise. Their elevated heart rates show the same internal reaction as the anxious children. This embodied response reveals their desire for closeness to their mother, but they do not react to it. Avoidants keep people at an arms length, and value their independence above all else. They often view their partners as needy or overly dependent. They are uncomfortable with closeness and intimacy.
Anxious and avoidants? They are magnetized to one another. They are bonded by their trauma, the anxious wanting connection, the avoidants wanting nothing to do with it. Like pouring gasoline on embers, it’s all to subconsciously heal our deepest core wants of love and intimacy. We seek out partners who can heal our deepest wounds, all in the quest for a better ending.
My own anxious attachment has dictated who I choose and how I relate. It’s really no surprise when I say it was as if he poured lighter fluid on all my attachment wounds, his avoidance fueling my hyper-vigilant and anxious tendencies. The two of us, like all anxious and avoidants, are drawn to each other by invisible threads.
In my twenties I dated handfuls of men unavailable to me, starving off breadcrumbs and then stumbling away rattled, shameful, and carrying the belief that something was wrong with me, that I’m somehow unlovable. A sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. Each time a relationship has ended, this belief system has been validated. Dr. Nicole LaPerra, the Holistic Psychologist said, “Once a core belief is formed, you engage with what’s called a confirmation bias. Information that does not conform to your beliefs is disregarded or ignored in favor of information that does.” My sense of settling for breadcrumbs, for constantly lacing up running shoes ready for the chase, has not been brought about in adulthood-- its simply been exacerbated. It has been engrained in me by a loving family who would do anything for me, not knowing that even the best intentions could leave marks that would affect me and my adult relationships. It showed up very early. My anxious tendencies.
I was 4 years old, chasing my brother up the stairs of the big house on the cul-de-sac in San Jose, California. My little legs slipped on the carpet when they couldn’t reach the next step, my troubled mind moving faster than my little legs were capable. This anxious, troubled chasing caused my feet to slither away from the grey carpet in slow motion, leaving my front teeth the first point of impact. My memory does not recall the pain, not the taste of blood in my mouth. My memory holds onto the vision of feet. The feet that were moving away from me. My brother continued up the stairs, in a quick pitter patter to the very last step, without him looking back despite the start of my wailing. I watched his feet as they passed the last steps, hoping they would turn around.
They never did.
When his feet disappeared and cleared the top of the staircase; I then noticed the blood, the salty tears. My mother swiftly appeared at my side, in the way that she often did. She immediately swooped me up in her arms and sat me on the yellow tiled kitchen counter, trying to hide the look of worried horror she wore on her face as she examined my teeth and the blood. The bright afternoon sun seeped through the window overlooking the front yard, beyond to the street where I learned how to ride a bike without training wheels. “Pedal, pedal, pedal!”, my Mom would yell. She taught me how to ride a bike, but now she was showing me how to swish peroxide in my mouth between cheeks. I felt my front teeth wiggle, the foul taste of peroxide taking over my tastebuds as I sat there swishing, cheeks sticking out, monkey-like and teary eyed, gaze fixated on this female martyr. “Pedal, pedal, pedal!” replaced with “Swish, swish, swish,” as she instructed me, her cheeks moving in and out, mimicking mine. Even with a full mouth of stingy disinfectant, I was wide eyed and heaving with sobs from the physical and psychological wounds that were caused from the chasing. I was only 4, but I had been chasing since I could crawl-- forever fixated on the feet that never turned around.
Carrying myself into adulthood, I’ve never stopped chasing, my feet just stopped moving. I’ve used all the language to mask that frantic little girl on the staircase, but buried deep, I’m still her. I’ve tried to put on this mask of independence, of confidence, of self-sufficiency. Of being that empowered woman that people look at and think She’s fine! She’s so lucky! She only has herself to worry about or care for! There are few people I’ve let see me in a different, more vulnerable state. I typically don’t like to let people see me sweat. There are few people I’ve let see the needy little sister. There are few people I’ve let see the rawness and the hunger to be loved in the ways I’m not familiar with. In turn, parts of me are still on that staircase in San Jose, tasting blood in my mouth but not being concerned with the blood— but those feet growing distance between myself and the top of the staircase. That’s the story that has defined me and my love life more than anything else. That’s the story that screams the truth. The truth I even have trouble admitting to.
The relationship was over before I could ask, How? As if I had a handful of sand in my palm, clutching it, knuckles white. He had pried my fingers away through a classic case of indifference, the fine granules slipping faster between my knuckles. An hourglass with a wide mouth. I lay on my stomach with my cheek pressed to my hands, watching his bare feet through the crack of my front door while he collected his things. It had been two days. He had not come home, nor faced me in the way I wished he had. I eventually got him on the phone where I clumsily blurted, I’m done. A laughable declaration in hindsight. He was already gone.
I had left it all outside. His things. I watched him grab it all without hesitation, through this small crack in the door. Men like him know how to leave without much thought. A form of torture, a relational inferno--watching a man you love’s feet moving in the opposite direction. I lay there dormant, buried inside myself, tragically stoic.
After he drove away, and the hum of the truck melted into the highway traffic, I got up. Women who had obsessed over men and their unavailability had repulsed me from a young age, and I still refuse to be that type of woman. I am not a pathetic woman. My mother did not raise a pathetic woman.
After he left, all that remained of him was the brief whiff of his clothes that had hung next to mine, where I am caught off guard one morning as I’m wrestling through my sock drawer. He physically left, but this residue of him lingered. The pieces of him that I saw whenever I looked in the mirror-- the parts of me that I had continued to turn away from. I had wanted to come back to myself. To peer under the bed and stretch my arm out to the wounded girl that hid underneath, telling her it’s safe, that I have her, that we don’t have to go through that again. That we don’t have to chase anyone up staircases or think about feet going the other direction. She looked at me with tormented eyes, as if she was begging me to stop indulging in these patterns.
Please trust me again, I pleaded.
In Yogic and Buddhist philosophy, there are five root causes to all of our suffering, the Kleshas. The primary klesha, called Avidya, is defined as ignorance, moreso the unawareness of reality. The things we turn away from, the truth of ourselves. In those moments where everything we invest in seems to dissolve, it gives us the opportunity to examine it. Within this close examination of self, we can ultimately become free from parts of our suffering. Avidya is the antidote to staying asleep, unconscious, unaware. Avidya asks us to investigate, to get curious. The core of Avidya is not the lack of information, but the inability to establish a deep connection to the self. Knowledge of the self is the remedy to much of our anguish, but the integration is where it matters most.
Self-knowledge hasn’t always saved me, and sometimes it hurts more to watch myself make the wrong decisions. But going through life like a whack-a-mole, blindly reacting through impulse and temptation with no idea as to why--is something I refuse to subscribe to. I see it in those who have hurt me. They are blind to their wounding and ultimately project it onto me. Without self-awareness, we cannot engage in relationships with a solid foundation of trust and open-hearted mutuality. As George Santayana said, “Those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” From my thresholds of pain, I have become so sick of my own bullshit that I will continue to try and choose differently. I will no longer engage with men who choose to stay asleep.
In the ultimate heroes’ journey, the Odyssey, the protagonist Odysseus is a kind and well-intended man on an epic adventure. Along the journey, he is warned by the goddess Circe about the Island of the Sirens. The Sirens are hungry monsters who disguise themselves as beautiful women, luring sailors to shore by their captivating song. “They sit beside the ocean, combing their long golden hair and singing to passing sailors. But anyone who hears their song is bewitched by its sweetness, and they are drawn to that island like iron to a magnet. And their ship smashes upon rocks as sharp as spears. And those sailors join the many victims of the Sirens in a meadow filled with skeletons.”
The Sirens are the ultimate temptation, just like the wrong type of man is for me. Circe warned the sailors and instructed them to fill their ears with beeswax to block out the song. With the singing muffled, the sailors truly see the sirens for who they are: monsters ready to maim a sailor tempted by their song of seduction. They do not waver, and they make it past the Island of the Sirens, unscathed, despite Odysseus thrashing in a desperate attempt to sail to the shore. Unlike the sailors, I was lured in by the sweet Siren song.
Avidya, my awareness is like beeswax in my ears. I will no longer be tempted by any love-bombing Sirens.
There’s a metaphor I heard once. It says “When a fish bites a hook, they get dragged in random directions and have to keep fighting against the pull. For a fish to swim safety in a lake, they don’t need to eliminate all the hooks from the water. They just need to recognize those hooks, and navigate around them.” This sentiment is mirrored as Bell Hooks writes in her timeless exploration of love in the wake of feminism, All About Love, “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
Eventually these situations and patterns will present themselves enough where the only option is to choose differently, to fully and completely put myself out of harms way. This heightened agitation paired with the feeling of being fed up is the ultimate antidote to changing my patterns and choices in love. My past poor judgements evaporate into the pavement, and is archived in the inner-library file titled Mistakes I’ll Never Make Again.
There still might be an indentation on my left cheek from where he took that hook and reeled me in. It has since scabbed over, healed even. I catch It in the mirror at times, the mark that he left. Sometimes it resembles more of dimple than a scar. This lesion, this scar, holds a possibility to change my trajectory of love and relationships. How can I not be grateful for this insight, the catalyst to send me over the edge? How can I not have reverence for it?
When I say that I was love-bombed, I don’t mean in it the same way that I was destroyed. Perhaps parts of me went missing into the catacombs of hope, including my better judgement. But sometimes we need to be destroyed to become something else. Sometimes we need to get flattened to rearrange ourselves and grow taller, more whole, more aware. Sometimes we need to stumble away from men like these to know we will never put ourselves through turmoil of that nature again. He freed me. Which is to say he didn’t harm me enough to become a calcified recluse, a hardened and cynical woman. While hope still festers inside of me, I refuse to be blinded by it.
As Rumi says, “the wound is the place where the light enters.”
Love bombing, it won’t kill you. Love bombing didn’t kill me.
It cracked me open. This I know for sure.