When lovers leave you
Three breakups before a first date
When this year began, I told myself I was tired of being alone all the time. I started this series to encourage myself to start dating again, but instead of inviting someone new into my life, this month I lost three things that were keeping me company in my loneliness.
Breakup #1
Three weeks ago, my foster dog and I walked to a basketball court near my home to meet with a potential adopter and his two dogs. After six weeks together, she had grown to be rather anxious anytime we passed another dog on the street (dogs in this foster care program cannot interact with other dogs as a protective measure). Every time I prevented an opportunity to sniff a dog butt, she would look at me with the saddest eyes.
I knew she wanted to be around other dogs, but when this burly man with his two pit bulls entered the basketball court, I immediately felt nervous about how she would react in this new situation. She started pulling toward them, and then jumped on top of them when she realized I wasn’t holding her back. The smaller one corrected her pretty quickly with a loud bark.
The man suggested we take a walk around the block to let the dogs settle into a rhythm. At first, she didn’t know what to do with herself; she pulled us back and forth across the sidewalk. I tried my best not to trip anyone or lose balance myself as she tried to make sense of whether she was living a dream or reality.
Halfway around the block, my foster got a piece of salt stuck in her paw, and started limping. The burly man pulled a napkin out of his pocket and bent down to clean her foot. By the end of the loop, she was walking alongside her new brothers like they were old friends, and her new dad was sure she would fit in perfectly.
He needed a week before he could pick her up, so we went back home and started counting down our last days together. It’s a weird feeling to love someone you know will leave you. Most people require the promise of permanence to open their hearts to the idea of love, but circumstances don’t always facilitate a forever kind of love. Sometimes you know someone will leave you, and you love them anyway because the memory is the only thing you can hold onto forever.
I expected to cry when she left, but instead I felt like I had done my part. She wasn’t missing. She had finally gone home.
Breakup #2
For the last 17 years of my life, I have used marijuana almost every day. This means I was fifteen when I started. Growing up in Denver, I saw a lot of functional addicts, and I thought it was a normal way to live your life. It wasn’t until I moved to New York that people started suggesting that I smoked too much.
My roommate was the first to make this suggestion. I was doing Ketamine therapy at the time, and in the session after she said this, I realized why I smoked so much.
A memory came back to me of when I was 16 or 17, and someone complimented me for never passing on the blunt, and always having one rolled to go next. This felt like the cool girl initiation I had been waiting for my whole life. Afterwards, I never said no to smoking.
After this epiphany, I started trying to change my relationship with weed, but I wasn’t ready to let go of the identity around it. I didn’t know who I was if I wasn’t a stoner. I have cut my consumption in half since then, but I started to feel like it was still too much.
Every time I got high this month, I realized I didn’t actually want it. I was doing it out of habit. But letting go was harder than I expected. Smoking felt like a compulsion I couldn’t break, not until I went to Miami for my birthday.
I knew being in a new environment would allow me to break the habitual routine I had gotten myself stuck in, so before I left, I cleared my apartment of any temptations. It’s only been two weeks, but this time is different. I have no desire to go back to the way I was living before.
Breakup #3
My biggest problem with sobriety is that I also use it medically to treat undiagnosed nausea and unmedicated anxiety and chronic insomnia and debilitating period pain and really any general annoyance. I’m finally at a place in my life where these symptoms are less present, and at some point, I started overmedicating myself unintentionally.
But without my good friend weed, I have been struggling to sleep. Every night when I fall asleep, I am met with a nightmare about the last man that I loved.
They all follow the same pattern. He breaks my heart in some bizarre competition for attention that I dream up. I watch him betray me, and I run off to find somewhere private to cry, and then it happens again. At this point in the dream, I start to become lucid. Aware that I am dreaming, instead of crying, I do something to take control of the situation.
In last night’s dream, I jumped into the front seat of the car and prevented it from crashing into a semi truck that was coming straight at us because he started making out with someone in the passenger seat. In every version of the dream, the moment I am safe, I try too hard to make sense of the details and wake up.
I’ve had enough Jungian therapy to understand that this is an individuation dream — a way to process past trauma and take agency over the pattern it imprinted on the psyche. My brain is trying to make sense of why he ghosted me and got back together with his ex without explaining anything. He just blocked me and never talked to me again.
When it happened, I was so devastated that I just had to accept the situation and move on. I buried the pain away deep in my heart because I think at the time I didn’t know if I would ever open myself up to someone that way again.
I didn’t realize the only reason I couldn’t was because the weight of that memory was keeping my heart anchored within my own chest—unable to share it with anyone, even when I wanted to.
All of this to say, I still haven’t been on a date, but I’m not giving up. Maybe I’ll get lucky in March <3
