my summer in attachment theory hell







this summer i wrote a bunch of essays on the internet, moved out of my Toronto apartment, moved out of my San Francisco apartment, cycled over New York City bridges at midnight, picked up my guitar again and found that i still know how to play Taylor Swift's Mine off by heart, stomped around Astoria in those perfect thrifted watercolour orange pants that strangers love to compliment, listened to Charli xcx's “i think about it all the time” on repeat, sent hundreds of messages to the chaotic groupchat of five long distance best friends, made up my mind to move back across the continent, and decided that i was done running away from my problems, maybe.



this summer i said to a new friend, writing is the way that i know how to be emotionally forward with my friends. in the negative space of this statement you can figure out that what i meant is, i'm terrible at being emotionally forward with my friends in a normal conversation so i write for it. i didn't realize until much later that i was preemptively trying to explain myself.



i used to think that attachment theory was a therapist-approved framework of excuses used by people to rationalize insane behaviour, then last month i found myself in sudden crisis mode so i called a west coast friend at midnight and she said, i think you're avoidant, welcome to the club. we hung up and i proceeded to take three self-help quizzes on the internet, as you do. my best friend once said that i can talk to anyone about anything but never about myself. i say that you would learn more about me by reading me on the internet for twenty minutes than talking to me at a party for two hours. i camp out in the office ignoring text messages when they stress me out. my friends are probably right about attachment theory, and about me.



she said, as an avoidant i feel like i take comfort in knowing that i can run away from anything if i really had to. she's right—if i've learned anything about this life, it's that you can always reinvent yourself: you can quit your job, break up with your partner, move across the continent, dye your hair blonde, quit your job again, move back across the continent; to a different city this time—and mostly, everything will turn out fine. it'll be great, even. you'll tell entertaining stories about past selves and the lives you could've lived and breathe a deep sense of relief that you escaped.



this all works out, right up until you decide to stay somewhere instead of leaving again. this time i've decided that i'm going to keep the job and commit to the city and the decisions i've made and figure out not just how to live with them, but how to realize the best version of myself in them: i'm going to find a place to put my guitar; i'm going to have plants i don't worry about killing because i left the country for six months; i'm going to stop missing parties on both coasts. this time i want something stable but permanence requires vulnerability, and i'm afraid of both permanence and vulnerability—to stay somewhere is to let a place become part of your mythology; to let someone become part of your life is to give them the power to ruin it.



attachment theory tells us that childhood upbringing influences the way you relate to people and i thought that was stupid, too, until i realized that i flinched when i watched The Farewell because the parents captured Chinese stoicism with too much realism for comfort. feelings were never discussed in our household growing up except for when we were fighting, and then they were boxed away until the next fight. even so, i've never doubted how much we love each other. people talk about avoidant types like they‘re something to be fixed, but i don’t care to fix any of my avoidant friends as much as i want to tell them that the avoidant in me sees the avoidant in them and do you want to sit by the water, do you want to go look at the moon, we don't have to say anything at all? i shut down when emotional vulnerability is demanded of me but i'm not afraid of emotion; i just want it on my terms. i've been chasing the opposite of this stoicism my entire life; am always in search of the edge of raw emotion; am always trying to stay openhearted despite wanting to to close off. i keep pouring my heart out on the internet into weird little letters for my friends; i've been doing this for years now; they're shared memory and an attempt at legibility.



new friend says, you can tell someone's attachment style from their favourite Gracie Abrams song. at first i wasn't sure about this because Risk is not an avoidant song, strictly—it's a fearful avoidant song, and i'm not scared of anything, except that i am. but, you know, Taylor Swift tells us that fearless is not the absence of fear. Taylor Swift makes questionable decisions in love, but you have to admire that she really, really believes in it. Taylor Swift gets her heart broken in public and a lesser person would falter, but she does it all over again every time and believes in it in entirety because she thinks that love is fearless and maybe i do, too.



these days i'm overly ambitious in love—i made a bunch of new friends this year and it's been easy; i adore people quickly and with as much honesty as i'm able; am instantly endeared by their quirks and the way they tell stories and the memes they send me; commit to memory their lore as if i am a stupid squirrel storing up random facts about my friends in my stupid heart in case they will be useful later when i love them.



befriending a writer is precarious because your best and your worst self are turned into mythology—i'm always overanalyzing every conversation; i'm always playing back your voice in my head. i'm always trying to sketch out a mental model of the people i adore on some fundamental level and in doing so i accidentally create canonical forms for the people i love which they could never live up to—but in many ways, the people in my life are so much more extraordinary than the versions of them in my head. i think that i'm good at building models of people and they still surprise me with their grace and their generosity of spirit; i can never quite capture the way that we negotiate the punchline of a joke together or the way that we share a knowing glance. i think that my friends are the funniest, sharpest, most precious people in the whole world and i think that anyone who inconveniences my friends is the worst person in the entire world. statistically this all seems unlikely to be true, but i believe it in entirety. the people i love are always better than i think they are, even when i put them on pedestals which they could never live up to. the distance between the canonical form of someone in my head and the reality of them is infinite and immeasurable, and yet somehow it doesn't matter at all, because we meet each other somewhere in-between—we surprise each other, disappoint each other, negotiate each other's boundaries until we're known; until this life together is built. the space between two people becomes a room, and sometimes, if we're lucky, the room becomes a shelter—but being shelter to each other means means learning to block out the storm together, and that requires learning to stay—in the space we've built up together, even when it feels like everything around us is on fire; especially then.



emotional vulnerability, it turns out, is one big exercise in learning to stay. mostly this means that i keep showing up even though my first instinct is to flee when the conversations get hard; when emotional intimacy feels scary and expensive; when we're talking about big feelings at midnight and at eight o'clock in the morning. it means that i'm not walking away even though my flight instinct is on a hairline trigger. it means that i'm sorry for not texting you back for three days; i'm mostly avoiding my phone because it stresses me out but i still adore you, i promise. it means that i make promises i intend to keep.



i used to think that permanence was a constraint but now i think that being grounded somewhere provides the room you need to figure out to fly. to new friend i said, i think it's bold to choose permanence in New York City; it's fearless to declare to the universe that you're going to carve out a place for yourself somewhere, and it's brave to figure out how to stay.