It has been twenty-five years since the last time I saw Him. Give or take some months, of course.
I turn forty this year. But I still turn into a teenager whenever I think of Him. My heart beats in my throat and I turn light headed and breathy from the rush of endorphins that thought releases. I love my husband. But I'm in love with Him.
Today is particularly bad. My mind is niggling on Him like a hair caught between my teeth. It's because I'm stressed. It's always because I'm stressed.
The poor guy never asked for any of this. He didn't ask for a love-struck teen to follow him home from school or shove daily love letters in his port. He didn't ask, a decade later, for an obsessive person to be following him around on social media, or to think of Him every day, or to contact Him with irrelevancies or unasked advice. I will send him the link to this blog, knowing that he probably never needs to see it or the information contained within it, but I will feel compelled to share it. I can know that about myself, I can know that it's something to avoid and I can rail against it, but in the end I know my own nature and I know I will succumb. I will measure my willpower by the number of days it takes me to pass this address along.
I have been obsessed with Him for most of my life. Sometimes I think it was just random happenstance - just one of those things that occasionally occurs within the teenage brain, and any boy could have been that target. Other times, I think it may have been pheromone selection, or it may have been something within my subconscious pointing towards the most obvious potential mate: a person within my IQ range who was articulate, fairly symmetrical, athletic and who came from a family within my economic social class. Or it could have been a combination of factors. But whatever pulled my attention to Him, somehow I managed to forge neural channels deep enough that He came to reside on a permanent basis in my working memory.
That's an issue for me. The average human being only has around four slots of working memory. So on bad days (like today) I'm mentally impaired. My logic becomes shaky. I get less done. I want to be rid of this obsession, but I don't even know where to start.
I find I'm grateful that I'm such a logical, practical person. I think it shields me, Him, and His family from the full force of my fixation. If I worked from a more emotional perspective, perhaps I would be a true stalker. I could easily imagine my entire life being overcome by it. That scares me, so I shrink from it. I pull myself even further toward rationality. And always I consider how my actions may affect Him. My fear suspends me in a holding pattern, unable to relax, unable to break free. I find myself, rather than looking at places to go to see Him, looking for the places He is so that I can avoid Him. I am ashamed that I am ruled like this. I feel I should be able to break away from this addiction to a false ideal, I should be able to replace it with healthier, more real alternatives, but nothing works.
Later this year, I will be holidaying in the same city as He lives... When I realised that the hotel I would be staying at is in the same suburb as His workplace, I was struck with fear. I want to see Him so much that it fills me. I want to touch Him with a ferocity that has never been equalled ever in my life. I love my husband. But if ever I was face to face with the object of my obsession, I am not certain what would happen inside myself. I am not certain what would happen inside my relationships. I am not certain I could cope. I am broken. Horribly, horrendously, irrevocably broken. I can stickytape myself together, but stickytape can only do so much. I fear the damage I can inflict on others if my guard is lowered for even an instant.
I've recently been looking at neuroplasticity. Can I change the way my brain works? Previously I've tried various methods to relieve my symptoms. For a while I was in contact with Him to try to crush the idealised versions that I worshipped (this worked to a small extent, but not enough). I kept Him on the fringe of my awareness for a long time, treating Him like just another person in my social media network (in times of stress, I found myself following his every move online, which was counter-productive). Then I roughly a year ago, while in the depth of a mental crisis, in desperation I blocked Him from my most prevalent social media outlets. I sought counselling. I avoided his online presence. Out of sight, out of mind, right? I wish.
I seem to be caught in a loop of falling back into the same patterns of thought. I've tried to break them. I've been trying to break them for over twenty-five years. This is a behaviour that doesn't work. It distracts me from tasks at hand, it makes me think poorly, it makes me doubt my own motives, it's counter-productive to my relationships.
But I don't know how to unlearn an emotion.
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