For those of you that didn’t know, my partner Mal has his own blog documenting the trials and tribulations of renovating our little home in Aberdeen (see here) and to put it mildly his blog has utterly exploded, recently taking in a sponsored revamp of one of our rooms. This has meant that our last few months have been pretty much dominated by plastering, painting, carpeting, furnituring and all the chaos that entails. Between that and working full time I’ve not really had the headspace to pay much heed to my own wee rant-fest (starting to be a bit of a pattern, I know….) but that’s not to say I’ve had nothing to say. I’ve ALWAYS got plenty to say, I’m just battling to find the time to get it all down in words for you lucky lot to be bored by.

A couple of recent occurrences have kinda triggered a bit of an introspective period for me, examining emotions and feelings, strengths and weaknesses and this has made me think about how I often struggle with attachment. Attachment to people, to objects, to familiarity, to pretty much anything but more importantly it’s made me examine how I manage those attachments. By that I mean how I maintain them, value them and when necessary how I break them but to think about that I need to try to explain  how I form attachments and why this is often such a massive issue for adults who have survived traumatic experiences.

So here goes.

I’ve already said here how meeting new folk is always an anxiety for me but in general change is nothing short of a torture, never anything to get excited about or look forward to due to my own skewered self image and when I am forced into new situations or meet new people I always find that I tend to go full tilt and overshare. Not fakery or braggarting, more like me but dialled up to 10 or on Berocca (other effervescent vitamin supplements are available, but anywoo….). The problem is that a lot of the time once I get past the get-to-know-you stage or settling-in stage I begin to relax and…. well, things seem to shift.

You know how sometimes when you get familiar with something, get comfortable with something or get to know something it slowly changes? How it looks, how it feels and how you experience it changes? Kinda that but with people. Before I know where I am I’ve gone all out and I’ve shared my deepest, darkest self with folk that probably didn’t really need to know in the first place but moreover people who I probably wouldn’t really have had that “bond” with anyway. Before I know where I am I suddenly have  relationships that I most likely wouldn’t have developed or nurtured and I get a feeling of responsibility in maintaining those connections when normally I wouldn’t.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting this happens with every person I meet. Far from it. Over the years I have made some beautiful and rewarding friendships this way and those people know exactly who they are and what they mean to me, it’s just the odd few connections that I feel compelled to maintain despite a massive lack of commonality. The reason for this is pure and simple. Burdens. Anyone who has survived any kind of abuse can vouch for the weight of emotion this leaves, be that shame, guilt, self-loathing, etc, etc, etc. I am very conscious of how that burden can transfer to someone else whenever I disclose my history and that in itself carries a huge responsibility. I find that the main reason I can’t seem to let these types of associations come to their natural end is once the disclosure is made it leads to a level of intimacy that is often difficult to detach from without appearing like a bit of a dick.  (You’d think I’d learn to keep my gob shut sometimes eh?!)

This means that when I do muster the balls to call time on less that rewarding relationships it has usually taken me so long to build up to it, to realise that it is the best thing for me to do to put myself first that for the other person the break can often appear to come out of the blue and I end up looking like a cold hearted, dismissive arsehole. Before, the thought of people having that perception of me would have horrified me. I had to have control over how others saw me and how others valued me simply because my own self-image was so miserably flawed, nowadays things are a bit different. Nowadays I tend to care less for how others view me, that’s none of my business anyway. People will see me exactly as they wish to and that’s okay, if I’m true to myself then I’m on to a winner. I find I have a little more confidence in how I see things, I can trust my own perception that little bit more than I ever have and I have a bit more of an understanding of how to nurture my own self worth and as twee as this will sound this is all because of one single fact.

I’m happy.

Not just Facebook happy or even smug-married type of happy but that sickening, saccharine sweet, suburban-housewife-on-valium kind of happy. My little life is very very charmed and I can’t help but be acutely aware of that and it blows me away every bloody day. My career is stable and secure, I’m closer to my family than ever I have been, they are my absolute world and are (dysfunctionally) plodding along quite nicely thank-you-very-much and my home life is pretty idyllic. All Mal and I do is just laugh. Granted it’s usually Mal laughing at me and my unbridled and unrelenting bampottery, but laughter is laughter is laughter. We genuinely have the best relationship I could possibly hope for

The thing is, I know why we are the way we are, why it all still feels new:

The way I see him hasn’t changed.