Psychology
You were taught, somewhere along the way, that needing people was a liability. maybe no one said it out loud. maybe life just kept rewarding you every time you didn’t need anyone, every time you endured alone what others fell apart over, every time you moved on from something that should have broken you and didn’t. the lesson compounded, without you knowing: detachment works. self sufficiency works. you are the proof.
Looking back at my experiences, I can now see that my pattern was never about avoiding responsibility itself. That was the story I told myself for years. The deeper concern was something else entirely. It was about avoiding the spotlight.
I’ve come to realize that not everything we “feel” belongs to the same category. Some emotions are momentary, they rise, peak, and then fade. Others are more persistent. They linger beneath the surface and shape our experience over time. The difference between an emotion and a state has become very clear to me.
Take emptiness, for example. Emptiness is often described as a feeling, but it behaves more like a state. When you feel hollow inside, it isn’t just a passing wave like anger or excitement. It’s a sense that something is missing. You can distract yourself from it, you can silence it temporarily, but it doesn’t fully disappear. It waits. If you’ve ever truly felt emptiness, you know it has continuity. look and investigate inside every time and you will feel it. It’s not a spark, it does not vanish easily.
I have observed many stories. friendships. partnerships. families. I have even lived inside some of them. And I noticed something. Relationships rarely die from one dramatic moment. They die from a hidden cancer.
It grows quietly. invisibly. accumulating over years. no one sees it. no one feels it. until one day, it is strong enough to turn love into resentment, and resentment into distance. I gave this cancer a name in February 2022. I called them small black dots. One black dot is harmless. almost invisible.
Among all the emotions I carry, disappointment sits in its own category, the one I least want to experience. I don’t feel it often, and that is not an accident. I don’t place people in positions where they can disappoint me, I don’t expect much from anyone, and I don’t let just anyone close enough to matter, something I’ve written about before in my defensive nature . on top of that, I’ve built a bubble around myself, overly selective about my environment, deliberate about who gets near it. I wrote about this at the opening of not broken but suboptimal . but none of that makes me immune. you cannot fully program your life. mistakes will happen. people you never invited will find their way in, and sometimes you won’t notice until it’s already too late.
The image I held about myself was always vague. if I am being honest, I never truly liked myself. I never paused long enough to build a clear internal picture of who I was beyond performance and ambition. this whole psychology conversation about self image and inner narratives felt unnecessary to me. I did not have a defined understanding of self worth. when someone asked me if I believed I was worthy of love, I genuinely did not know how to answer. I did not spend time thinking about those questions. they did not feel practical. they would not buy me the Lamborghini I wanted, so why should they occupy space in my mind. for the longest time, introspection felt like a luxury I don’t want to invest in.