The Part That Takes an Embarrassingly Long Time to Figure Out
Healing took me an embarrassingly long time. Not the neat little arc you see in other people’s feeds, where a meltdown becomes a mini montage and then poof, boundaries. I mean slow, grateful, ugly, patchwork work. Years of knowing what I did and still doing it. Being able to say the words anxious attachment while simultaneously drafting the panicked message I told myself I would not send.
I was twenty four when I was diagnosed with Tourette’s. It was the early internet era; advice lived in sleepy forums and blog posts written at midnight. I read everything. I dissected myself. I learned a language for my brain and then used that language to justify behaviour instead of change. Self awareness felt like a medal. Regulation felt like the real test.
But I tried. God, I tried. I tried to be the amazing friend, the perfect girlfriend who was easy to keep. I softened, I apologised preemptively, I performed calm in the hallways of my own anxiety. I convinced myself that if I could be small enough, tidy enough, lovable enough in the right ways, I would be safe. Spoiler: you can edit yourself into exhaustion and still be lonely.
The Perfect Girlfriend Project
There is a performative energy to wanting to be good. I read the books, I followed the accounts, I memorised the words therapists used in podcasts. If someone stayed then that meant I had done the work, or at least I liked to tell myself that. If someone left, I assumed failure. So I began auditioning for stability like it was a job interview where my cover letter was calmness.
I learned to read tone like currency. I’d rehearse responses. If a sentence land slightly flat, I would backtrack. I would the smooth edges until my own personality looked like a carefully ironed shirt. Intensity felt dangerous. Peace felt suspicious. If we weren’t talking about the meaning of everything for hours on end, was the relationship even substantial? I equated drama with depth and that was a very expensive mistake.
Underneath it all was fear dressed as practicality. I was trying to secure love by becoming indispensable. I apologised before I needed to apologise. I made myself smaller in arguments so we could tidy up and move on. I thought that the person who chose me would be the proof that I had finally done enough. I forgot to ask if the person choosing me was someone worth choosing.
Lockdown: When The Pattern Got Loud
Covid rudely removed the windows of escape. Plans evaporated. My marriage, which had a way of being performatively fine in public, became a small room with no exits. The quiet exposed habits you can hide when you are busy. I found myself drinking far too much wine, far too often, replaying scenes from different partnerships like an editor with bad taste.
Different cities, different men, same nervous system. The panic at a delayed reply. The micromanaging of tone. The desperate attempts to preempt disaster. It was obvious in a way it had never been before: I had rehearsed these moves since childhood. The script felt familiar because I had written it into myself. Familiarity was not safety. It was simply pattern.
Saying that out loud felt like both a relief and a betrayal. Relief because the map looked sensible for once. Betrayal because the map led back to my childhood living room. The person who triggered my worst instincts was not always the latest partner. Sometimes it was the echo of the old house that taught me survival as a performance.
Where The Roots Were: Family, Not Fate
No one is born with anxious attachment as a hobby. You pick it up in households where affection is inconsistent, where mood changes require you to be nimble. You learn to be readable and to make yourself agreeable because it keeps the peace. That is not weakness. That is adaptation. But adaptation can turn into an autopilot that flattens you.
So I became excellent at second guessing. I could read rooms like a psychic, anticipate moods and adjust my volume accordingly. I mistook that skill for kindness. I mistook compliance for care. The truth was, I thought being small would protect me, because it had once worked when a mood change meant damage.
Understanding that my wiring came from a domesticated survival strategy changed the blame equation. It did not mean I deserved harm. It meant I could stop pretending my choices were random. I could see the pattern. And once you can see the pattern, you can choose new moves. That was terrifying. It was also the only place actual change begins.
Where I Was: Not Innocent, Not Villain
Here is the part that took the longest to say without wanting to crawl under the duvet. I was not purely a victim. I was not always the villain. I was both inconvenient and complicated. I sent the 2am essay. I over explained a throwaway message until it became an argument. I apologised for being myself and then apologised for apologising. I was exhausting at times, and that exhausted other people.
I mistook loud for love for far too long. I created pressure to prove connection. I believed that if I could demonstrate feeling hard enough, it would confirm belonging. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it only pushed people away. Intention rarely erases impact, and I had to learn that hard lesson without romanticising the result.
What actually shifted was daily and dull. I learned to pause. To put the phone down when my chest started running a script. To count to thirty and breathe. To say, I need a little time, rather than launching a dossier of fears at someone at midnight. I built small rules: no heavy conversations after nine, no tricky topics when tired. I taught myself the boring stuff. I apologised and then did the repair work. That is less glamorous than a big speech, but it is steadier.
The Work: Practical, Unsexy, Radical
If you want the lesson, here it is in plain words. You can be delulu and do the work. You can be dramatic and still be responsible. The trick is to stop using your history as a license to harm. Do the emotional homework. It looks like sitting with discomfort instead of weaponising it. It looks like therapy. It looks like boundaries. It looks like practising small acts of self-regulation until they become a reflex.
My list is embarrassingly low tech. I drink matcha. I walk. I pet Lulu and remember the point of pets is not catharsis but company. I put rules on my conversations. I set timers on my phone before replying to a message that spikes me. I own my tics. I tell partners what lands and what does not. I don’t expect other people to archive my childhood and manage it for me. That’s my job.
Main character energy isn’t permission to create chaos. It’s ownership. It’s admitting you were sometimes the cause and also the wounded party. It’s repairing without waiting for someone else to notice.And it’s choosing not to bleed old wounds on people who didn’t cut you in the first place. That’s the slow, unshowy glow up. No applause necessary. Just better choices, quieter nerves, and maybe the odd triumphal cup of matcha at 7am.
You Are Not Entitled to an Answer – Chaos, Crumbs and Clarity
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