It feels like I've spent a lifetime auditioning for the wrong part. There was always a man, always a relationship, always a new version of myself I was willing to try on if I thought it might finally make someone stay. Looking back, the men were different, but the role I played was remarkably consistent. I was always trying to figure out what I needed to become to be loved.
The first man hit me. What is strange to admit now is that I didn't immediately understand that this meant he didn't love me. I had grown up in a house where screaming, hitting and name calling were part of everyday life. Love and fear had always lived rather comfortably beside each other. I love you so much, that's why I get so angry didn't sound like an absurd explanation. It sounded familiar. So when he hurt me, some part of me wasn't asking, Why would someone who loves me do this? It was asking, What did I do to make him this angry? I had already learned that when someone you love hurts you, your first responsibility is to look for the thing you did wrong.
The second man taught me something different. He cheated on his girlfriend to be with me, and at the time, I think some part of me mistook being chosen for being valuable. I had won. Someone had picked me over someone else. Until, of course, he did exactly what he had done before, only this time I was the girlfriend being replaced. He cheated on me with someone much younger, and the breakup was devastating. But underneath the heartbreak was something much older: the fear that perhaps I was simply not enough to make someone stay. That maybe love was always a competition, and there would always be someone prettier, younger, easier, more exciting, more whatever than me.
Then came the man who stayed. And somehow, staying made it possible for him to do much more damage.
For eight years, he slowly taught me who I was. He told me I was a loser. That I would never reach where he had reached. That I needed to change. He was extraordinarily good at making me doubt my own understanding of things. Eventually, I stopped thinking, he thinks there is something wrong with me, and started thinking, there is something wrong with me. I learned to distrust my own judgment. I learned to explain myself. Defend myself. Correct myself. I became so busy trying to become acceptable to him and his family that I barely noticed I was disappearing.
He wanted me to become the kind of woman his mother would approve of. And his mother had spent years enduring abuse herself. The lesson I absorbed from that family was almost unbearable in its simplicity: this is what a good woman does. She tolerates. She serves. She stays. She absorbs the cruelty and keeps the family together. She doesn't make herself difficult. She doesn't leave.
And I spent eight years learning how to be that woman.
The marriage eventually broke down, and I thought I had finally broken free of the pattern. I had rebelled against everything I had grown up with. I had become independent. I had built my own life. I had learned how to take care of myself. I thought independence meant I had escaped the little girl who had once learned to be submissive in order to be loved.
But maybe I had only escaped the rules.
I hadn't escaped the role.
Because I still kept choosing men around whom I had to surrender some part of myself.
That is the part that frightens me now. I can see it so clearly in retrospect. I have spent my adult life trying very hard not to become the woman I grew up around, while repeatedly choosing relationships that put me back in the same emotional position. I became rebellious in every way except the one that mattered most. I stopped letting people tell me how to live, but I kept letting the people I loved tell me, in one way or another, who I was allowed to be.
I know the pattern. My therapist told me years ago that I keep choosing the same kind of man. I know about the childhood conditioning. I know that familiarity can masquerade as love. I know that being unavailable can make someone feel more desirable, because somewhere deep inside me, I am still trying to win something that was never freely given to me.
I know all of this.
And knowing hasn't stopped me.
That is what makes me feel so helpless.
I've spent years becoming independent. I can take care of myself. I can solve my own problems. I can pick myself up. I can leave. I can survive. I have become very, very good at surviving.
But I'm tired of surviving.
Sometimes I don't want to be the strong, independent woman who can handle everything. Sometimes I want someone to make me dinner. I want someone to buy me a dress because they saw it and thought I would look beautiful in it. I want someone to notice that I'm exhausted and take something off my hands without being asked. I want to be taken care of. Cherished. Held.
Not because I am incapable of taking care of myself.
Because sometimes I don't want to.
And maybe that is the thing I have been afraid to admit. Beneath all this independence is not a woman who doesn't need anyone. There is a woman who has needed someone for a very long time and became so good at not needing anyone that she forgot the difference.
I don't think there is something wrong with me because I want to be cared for.
But I do think something in me still believes that love has to be earned.
Maybe that is why I keep auditioning.
Maybe that is why being chosen feels so intoxicating.
Maybe that is why an unavailable person can hold so much power over me. If he finally chooses me, then perhaps some ancient part of me gets to believe that I was finally good enough.
Except I'm beginning to understand that I cannot spend the rest of my life trying to win a prize that was never supposed to be a competition.
I don't know if I'm ready to stop.
That's the embarrassing truth.
I understand the pattern and I am still inside it. I can name exactly what is happening and still lie awake wanting the person who cannot give me what I need.
Maybe finding myself isn't going to be some beautiful moment where everything suddenly becomes clear.
Maybe it is much uglier than that.
Maybe it is sitting alone and admitting that I don't want to be alone anymore.
Maybe it is admitting that I want to be loved, but not just loved.
I want to be chosen, available to, cared for, and safe with.
And maybe, after a lifetime of auditioning for people who needed me to become someone else, the hardest part will be believing that I am allowed to walk into a room as myself and not audition at all.