the poison behind attachment

i have come to learn there is so much dangerous power that surrounds attachment. not necessarily because attachment in itself is wrong — we as humans are wired for it, made for it, it keeps us alive in a drunkenly sort of way. however the way we attach slowly and quietly erases us. attachment often disguises itself as love, hiding in the small crevices of our heart. 

it creeps in through compromise. through the nights you stay silent instead of saying what you may need. through the hobbies you abandoned because no one else values them so why should you?

attachment is the start of losing yourself. it looks like silence, like nodding along, like laughing at a joke you don’t really find funny. it looks like shrinking your desires until they fit inside someone else's idea of comfort. in the end, it looks like compromise when its really surrender. 

i have found myself at the hands of attachment before, suffocated by this need to be loved and this incentive to do whatever i must to foster it. when your nervous system is shaped in uncertainty, attachment can feel like survival. you don’t ask, is this person good for me? you ask, what do i need to become so they don’t leave? and slowly, without meaning to, you trade pieces of yourself for proximity. because in the end, what are you if not this person’s person?

attachment, when twisted by fear, becomes a kind of worship. you put someone at the center and orbit around them until you forget you were ever a sun.

psychologists call this self-loss — the erosion of identity in service of connection. but words like that feel clinical, too clean. it doesn’t capture the slow ache of disappearing while still being looked at. it doesn’t capture the horror of someone saying i love you when the “you” they’re speaking to has long since vanished.

i believe this is why relationships feel exhausting even when at the surface look  stable. you’re not just loving someone, you’re managing them. scanning for shifts in tone. reading between silences. regulating their moods at the expense of your own. your worth becomes relational, always measured in the eyes of another.

and often times, this is totally unconsciously happening. attachment has become this sort of addiction in our society where most people don’t even realized how attached they were till their person is gone and out of reach.

our society romanticizes this surrender of ourself — stories where love means giving up everything for someone, where characters are only whole when they dissolve into each other. as if losing yourself is proof of devotion. and as soon as any physical intimacy is introduced into a relationship, it is as though you are giving your whole self to another being. those strings connected to the other person become double knotted and a new sense of attachment is developed. 

but real intimacy doesn’t require erasure. real intimacy expands you. it makes more space, not less.

healing means breaking that pattern. it means learning that being chosen is not the same as being valued. that presence should not cost you your personhood. that safety doesn’t come from vanishing into someone else, but from standing whole in yourself, even when it feels terrifying.

and it’s hard. even now, i notice the reflex — to shrink, to shift, to soothe. i catch myself thinking i’ll only be loved if i am convenient. but i also catch myself more quickly. i remind myself that the relationships that require my disappearance are not intimacy, they are repetition. not soulmates, but mirrors of old wounds.

the dangerous power of attachment is that it can turn into a slow undoing. but its gift, when held with awareness, is that it can also be a way back. a practice of staying with yourself, even as you reach for someone else.

because love should never mean losing who you are.