Distance Is Not the Same as Loss

I am in a process. These days, I find myself writing that down more and more often, as if, by writing it often enough, I will somehow come to understand exactly what that process is about. I don’t. What is becoming increasingly clear to me, though, is what happens inside me when someone I love deeply is not close to me. My mind is remarkably good at this. Distance becomes loss, less contact becomes less love, and silence becomes being forgotten. It happens incredibly fast. Something perfectly ordinary happens and, before I know it, my mind has created an entire story in which I have become less important, the other person has less need for me, and love can disappear if I am not paying attention. The difficult thing is that, when I believe such a story, it doesn’t feel like a story at all. It feels like the truth.

So I do something. I reach out, ask questions, and want reassurance that everything is still okay. That the other person still thinks of me, that I haven’t been forgotten, and that the love is still there. I tell myself that by doing so I am standing up for myself and taking good care of myself. When I get that reassurance, I feel relief. For a moment. Because reassurance works wonderfully, as long as you get it. Then I need it again, and I get incredibly frustrated with myself because I have shown a side of myself that I really don’t want to show. By now, I recognize the pattern. I am extremely consciously incompetent—the most difficult stage in the learning process. I understand what I am doing, but that doesn’t mean I know how to do it differently yet.

I have a special friendship with someone I love very much. We have consciously chosen not to make our connection physical. Not because we want distance from each other; quite the opposite. We are very close. By leaving the physical form out of it, there is room to truly experience what is happening between us. Without the distraction of physical contact, we meet each other on another level. Not only in everything that is beautiful and loving, but also in the parts I would rather keep hidden: fear, insecurity, and the need for reassurance.

Not everything that feels good helps me discover what is really going on inside me. Some forms of closeness can also be a wonderful distraction, a way of not having to feel for a while, not having to look, and above all, not having to go all the way to the core. And that is where we do want to go. Not by avoiding the ugly parts, but by allowing them to come to light within the love that is already there. Not to solve them for each other, but to explore them and ultimately heal them.

To heal in love.

In October, I will start the first year of the training program, and I will be going much deeper into this process. I want to give myself as little opportunity as possible to move away from it. Yet my difficult parts know how to find me perfectly well even without physical distraction. Talking is an important way for us to be together. When we have the time, we can talk endlessly. For hours. Sometimes almost an entire day. We simply don’t always have that kind of time.

And that is where something interesting happens inside me. My mind very easily turns “less time for contact” into “less need for contact.” Those are two very different things. Rationally, I know that perfectly well, but the moment I feel it, that knowledge suddenly seems to be worth very little. As the quantity of our contact decreases, I encounter something I don’t particularly like looking at in myself. I can hold on to someone without touching him. I can hold on to his words, his voice, to the reassurance that he is still there. The form is different, but my need to hold on knows exactly where to find its way.

Somewhere, of course, I know where that fear comes from. My father murdered my mother when I was one year old. In one instant, I lost both my parents. My mother because she was no longer there, my father because he was the one who had murdered her. I only miss one of them. My mother. In the years that followed, the people who took care of me were constantly changing. Until I was seven, there was very little continuity in who was there for me. Somewhere during those early years, a deep-rooted fear of abandonment developed.

I have hardly any memories of my mother. I don’t know what it felt like when she held me. I cannot bring back her voice, her scent, or the touch of her skin. I don’t know what her mother’s love felt like. And I know damn well what it feels like to miss her. That is the bizarre thing about such an early loss: I don’t know what I am missing. And that makes missing her so incredibly painful.

By now, I can identify my fear of abandonment quite well. I recognize when it is being triggered and understand what it is connected to. Wonderful. It just doesn’t go away because of that. Having an insight is something different from living that insight. The difference between form and content touches precisely on what I am encountering now. I very easily connect love with time together, conversations, words, and someone showing me that they are there. As soon as something changes in that, my ego very quickly concludes that something must also have changed in the love itself.

And yet I feel something completely different when I leave all the stories aside for a moment. I feel loved. Deeply loved, in fact. That is what makes it so confronting. I can feel incredibly loved and still need reassurance five minutes later. I often know damn well what I am doing and then do it anyway. Like the car of a roller coaster that, once it starts moving, cannot simply be stopped. I ask a question when I already know it isn’t really a question. I am not looking for information. I am looking for reassurance. Something that tells me that everything is still okay, that I haven’t been forgotten, that nothing has been lost.

But underneath that, there is something else. I use the other person to confirm how I feel about myself. Not only to reassure me, but also to give me back what I already deeply believe about myself. When I don’t feel important, less time together can become proof that I am indeed not important. When I feel alone, silence can confirm that, in the end, I am on my own. When I am afraid of being abandoned, an answer that is different from the one I hoped for can suddenly mean that exactly that is happening. The other person doesn’t actually have to say anything about it. My mind fills it in for him.

And that is confronting, because it means that I can not only become dependent on what the other person gives me, but I can also give him a role in how I see myself. I can use him to feel loved, but just as easily to confirm my own fear, insecurity, or sense of not being enough. Then I am no longer truly looking at him or at what is happening between us. I am looking at myself through him, and then I see exactly what I expected to find in the first place.

I want to love wholeheartedly. Not need someone to constantly tell me who I am or what I am worth. For me, that is the next layer of healing in love. The other person does not have to take away my fear, nor does he have to prove that what I believe about myself is not true. These parts of me are allowed to become visible within the love that is already there, without me immediately placing them on him and asking him to make them disappear. It sounds beautiful until you actually have to do it. Because when I don’t reach for reassurance, the feeling simply remains with me. Then I encounter myself. Not to get rid of it as quickly as possible, but to explore what is actually mine.

At such a moment, I can ask God for help. Not for answers, and not to tell me how something will turn out. I don’t need to know what the next step is. I ask Him to give me the trust that everything is okay, exactly as it is. That nothing needs to be different from what it is right now in order for it to be okay. That there is a path laid out for me and that I can trust that I am exactly where I am meant to be, even when that place is uncomfortable and I would rather get away from it as quickly as possible. I don’t have to change my surroundings in order to feel safe. I may learn to trust that this, too, is part of my path.

I can’t do that yet. I am not writing this afterwards, with a neat list of everything I have learned by now. I am already getting a fairly clear picture of what I encounter along the way. Sometimes I only understand afterwards what I have done; sometimes I realize it while I am still on the ride and still can’t get the car to stop. And sometimes I simply believe every word my mind tells me.

That is where I am now. At the beginning. Not with answers or a beautifully healed end result, but with the trust that I don’t have to be there yet either. I am exactly where I am meant to be.

Distance is not the same as loss. Less contact does not mean less love. And when I cannot feel that for a moment, I don’t have to use the other person to tell me who I am. I can return to myself, to God, and to the trust that everything is okay, exactly as it is.

With love Daniëlle