I Didn’t Respond Because I Want You to Keep Loving Me
I often take a long time to respond to text messages from the people that I love most. Sometimes I get nervous when I see one of my best friends’ names appear on my phone, or when I see a question mark at the end of their most recent message.
These habits reflect a deeper truth: I have a tendency to keep my distance from people that I care about, because I believe that this is the best way to preserve a relationship with them. Set out in black and white, it sounds nonsensical. But it isn’t rooted in logic. It is rooted in fear. It is rooted in a long-held belief in my own inherent inadequacy, and that sharing with others is a risky activity. A part of me believes that I am always just one mistake or “divulgence” away from losing the people that love me. That once they see a particular side of me, the “real me”, they’ll lose interest. This often motivates me to take actions that actually breed greater disconnection - like taking longer to respond to messages, giving dishonest or incomplete answers to their questions, or putting off phone calls that we schedule to catch up and reconnect. I’ll leave messages unread for days as a way to artificially extend our conversation without having to take the vulnerable step of divulging more about my life.
My relationship with my brother has most been impacted by my self-protective relationship with connection. I think that my brother is incredible - he’s open, dynamic, gentle, fun, and really honours others. He is reticent to say anything negative, he encourages the people around him, and is silly and profound in equal measure. Having grown up together, we saw so many parts and sides of each other. When I look back, most of what I remember is behaviour, either towards him, or in his vicinity that I’m ashamed of. He had seen many of my worst moments, and I wished that I could erase them from his memory. Knowing he had seen my worst motivated me to control what he could see of me moving forward. I so deeply wanted him to love me. I thought so highly of him, and so poorly of myself. And I was confident that I wasn’t as substantially different from the child that he had known as I needed to be to deserve that love. I believed that the more that I let him see of me, the more he would see what I already saw in myself: the inadequacy that rendered me undeserving of his love and attention. I was confident that deeper insight into my genuine personhood would reveal that I was uninteresting, self-absorbed, ungrateful , and judgmental - all of the things that I didn’t see in him and didn’t want to give him the opportunity to see in me. I valued our relationship so much that I engaged with it as little as possible, thinking it was the only way to preserve it.
With the exception of my annual call to him on his birthday, I kept our communications limited and brief. When he would thoughtfully reach out, I would spend hours contemplating and then formulating some kind of quippy response - one that would show that I cared, disclosed very little personal information, and closed off any threat of follow-up questions. In my first year after law school, when my mental health was at a low, he sent me a tiny meditation book for Christmas, so that I could carry it around with me. He sent me a note about how meditation had helped him at some of his lowest points. The thoughtfulness of this gesture brought me to tears. I felt so seen and loved, right where I was. But I still convinced myself that communicating that would be too much. That while his gift indicated that he had seen my low, I wanted to keep up the facade in the hopes that his perception was still brighter than my reality.
Over the last few years, I’ve seen a significant shift in my relationship with my brother. We chat regularly, know who each others’ friends are and ask about them. We’re in each others’ lives in a more significant way than we had ever before chosen. And most significantly, for me, I’m excited to share new things with him. In stark contrast to the days that I hid parts of my life, I tell him about my fiddle lessons, my writing, trips I’ve taken - unprompted. As time went on I became more and more comfortable filling what had been silences in our early phone calls with experiences I’d had, choices I’ve been considering, and projects that I want to pursue. I found myself reaching out more, inspired to touch base by a new development that I wanted to share with him, or seeking an update on an event he had planned that had taken place since our last conversation. I found myself doing life alongside my brother, the closest we’d ever been, an ocean apart.
What changed over these years? Me. My relationship with myself. I credit my healing for the restoration of our relationship. While I am incredibly grateful for my brother’s care and diligence in pursuing a relationship, it wasn’t the incredible acceptance that I felt from him that enabled me to finally be vulnerable and reveal more of myself to him. My willingness to be vulnerable has increased at pace with my own self-acceptance. The rise in heart rate that used to accompany a notification that he was calling dissipated gradually as I realised that his acceptance of a particular characteristic of mine doesn’t change my fabric. The trepidation that came with answering questions about my life diminished as I learned to respond with integrity, knowing that I would not judge myself based on whatever reaction I perceived on his part. The comfort of giving empty answers lost its value when I realised that it, in fact, bred greater disconnection than my honesty.
“My willingness to be vulnerable has increased at pace with my own self-acceptance.”
This healing happened over time. I learned to live authentically in this relationship the same way that I learned to play the fiddle - I practised. I started by responding more honestly to his direct questions - telling him all of the things that I did over the past weekend, not just the activities I thought he would approve of. As my comfort grew, and I developed a stronger relationship with myself, knowing that I would stand behind my choice to share regardless of reaction, I would share more details about the events. As time went on, I found myself not waiting for a question to arise to tell him about my weekend, a funny interaction I had in the pub, or an interesting person that I met at a conference. Throughout this process of deeper and deeper divulgence I kept an open dialogue with myself. When I heard that voice advising me not to share a story, or not to get so vulnerable with my brother, I would acknowledge that she was trying to protect me and respond with, I’ve tried that way, and I didn’t like where it got me, so let’s try this way instead. And the more I did, the more I acknowledged the pain from which that fear came, the more I spoke to that part of myself and assured her that we didn’t need to be afraid because we’re choosing authenticity and connection, the less I heard from her - because that fear, though not quelled, was addressed.
“I learned to live authentically in this relationship the same way that I learned to play the fiddle - I practiced.”
A deeper and more immediate healing happened when I went one step further, and expressed that deep rooted fear of rejection that had been driving me all these years to a dear friend. At a church retreat last May, I was brave enough and felt safe enough to voice my fear and acknowledge how deeply embedded it felt within my fabric. I told her “I just really believe that I’m one divulgence away from people wanting nothing to do with me. Not one particular thing, but that at any point, once people learn something about me - see a side of my personality, hear one of my political opinions, catch a glimpse of my ambitions - that will be it.” She replied, “that just isn’t going to happen. You are amazing. It isn’t because of what you do, it is because of who you are”. What I heard her say was “We don’t love parts of you. That’s not how it works”. And in that moment, I felt significant release from that belief. I saw that I had struggled to fathom love that wasn’t built on performance. To me, love was judged by a panel with score cards - something that I am entitled to if I check the right number of boxes and score enough points. But that’s not how I love people, and that’s not, it seems, how people love me, either. Her response was so helpful to hear, but I don’t think that was what made that moment powerful. I had been told the same thing before. But I had never before voiced that fear. And when I spoke it out, when I acknowledged the thing that had been circling in my mind for decades, it lost its power.
My belief that I couldn’t be loved for who I am was what ultimately led to disconnection. I spent so long hiding because I thought that was the only way that I could maintain relationships. I deeply craved connection and used the limited tools at my disposal to try to foster it. And it worked, to some extent. I have a group of incredible friends, a wonderful family, and a beautiful marriage. But at a certain point, those tools only let me go so deep with people, and I found myself longing for a level of connection that I couldn’t pursue while still holding onto the belief that I couldn’t be loved if I shared all of myself with the people in my life. I needed to strengthen my relationship with myself and choose to acknowledge my fear of rejection to become more vulnerable in my relationships with other people.
Vulnerability became less scary when I decided that I wouldn’t let other peoples’ responses to parts of myself impact my relationship with myself. I threw away the score card that I used to earn love. I stopped evaluating myself by other peoples’ standards and expectations. I chose genuine connection, not only with the person in front of me, but also with myself. Vulnerability became less scary because I knew that, even if I perceived judgement from someone else because of something that I shared, I would no longer respond by wishing that I had kept that part hidden away. As I tell myself regularly, I have tread that path and I know that, in the long run, it will lead to greater disconnection than perceived rejection does. I have chosen to value integrity over acceptance.
Until very recently, my brother didn’t know the deep rooted fear that drove my interactions with him. He didn’t know that I spent years wishing for the relationship that we have today. Once I built deeper trust in my relationship with myself and acknowledged the fear that drove my actions, I was finally able to contribute to building that relationship. And now, my brother not only knows why I kept him at arm's length all those years - he also knows me. I hope he also knows that his continued effort to connect despite my slow responses and limited engagement is one of the greatest examples of the kind of non-score-card love that I thought wasn’t possible. The unconditional kind.
