I was ten when I met a girl I was eager to befriend, and took to diligently sending her emails, typing ‘Wazzup?’ in our Google Plus chat thrice a week until it became painfully evident that (a) she didn’t care and (b) I was a third-tier friend at best. At 21, when a situationship admitted he didn’t see a future with me, there it was again—the same sickening urge to beg, plead, cajole, wheedle, arm-twist him into noticing my worth. As we sat on my bed, bathed in the soft glow of an IKEA lamp, I half-jokingly began to list out all the reasons I was, in fact, worthy of being chosen. “I’m a psychology major,” I pointed out earnestly, “so I can introduce you to interesting theories I’ve found. You’ll never be bored.”
A popular quote by author David Foster Wallace periodically makes the rounds on Instagram: “Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.” It echoes the white-knuckle grip I maintain on everything I care deeply about. Perhaps it also explains why, when my boyfriend of one year broke up with me a month ago after finding out he was leaving the country for good, my knee-jerk response was to propose that we schedule our breakup for March. “It’ll give us a cooldown period, so we can get used to each other’s absence without ripping off the bandaid entirely,” I reasoned. When he agreed, somewhat reluctantly, I heaved a sigh of relief.
But my repose was short-lived because as the days went on, I realised I’d bought a first-class ticket to a purgatory of sorts. Technically, I was still dating my boyfriend but as he grew increasingly colder and unlike himself, I found myself grappling with an uneasy dissonance: the person I cared for was alive and breathing, yes, but his presence felt no different from his absence. On one hand, I was dutifully keeping up the pretence of a normal relationship, but on the other, I still flinched each time he used my actual name instead of his usual nickname for me or replied to my messages after six hours of radio silence. It was only when I Googled ‘I feel like I’m grieving someone who’s still alive’ one evening that I finally came across the term ‘ambiguous loss’, coined by Dr. Pauline Boss in the ’70s, to describe losses that are unclear or confusing. “Everyone experiences ambiguous loss, if only from breaking up with someone, having aging parents or kids leaving home,” iterates her website.
In her book, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief, Boss points out that ambiguous loss is the most unbearable kind of loss we can feel in our relationships because it confronts “the absurdity of not being certain about a person’s absence or presence.” In the weeks after my breakup, I stared this absurdity directly in the eye as it sent me into an unhinged spiral. Half-convinced that an unlucky planetary position or ill-intentioned frenemy’s nazar was behind my misery, I soon found myself turning a bit woo-woo—trying to talk to a tree branch after discovering an Instagram post about the Celtic tradition of confiding in trees, scouring the r/Tarotpractices subreddit for free readings while parroting the same question: ‘Will my boyfriend and I reconcile?’, all while doing salt purification rituals to get rid of the evil eye.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: vogue.in
