One password for two phones. Free access to bank cards. All friends are shared. Some might call this relationship addiction. And for someone, this is exactly what closeness and secure attachment look like, so necessary for a person.
I have no secrets from my husband. My life is open and clear, like the morning sky in a cool autumn. There are no secrets, but there is a secret room. I do not know where she is. I don’t remember the name of this city, what the house looks like, what kind of landscape is outside the window.
Usually I find my secret room for a subtle motif from the past. Two or three phrases, a sudden response of the body — a painful, sharp shock to the heart, and now I can already sing a forgotten song. And to find the keys to the secret room: I thought that I lost them, forgot them, threw them into the sea, but they always lie in my pocket.
My secret room is the loneliness that I would like to forget.
Human needs human. Insider. In order not to stand in a dark corridor with the thought: will it really be like this forever?
I deliberately stretched my loneliness to two or three years in order to become invisible to men and immerse myself in a career. And now, at the age of 25, I am already the editor-in-chief, the second higher education at RUDN University, spa tours to Switzerland, packages with cosmetic junk. I am smart, stylish, but also tough and cold. And there is nobody next to me. Even a cat.
I recently watched a video interview with actress Yulia Akhmedova. She talks about depression, profession and loneliness: “I can get up at night to use the toilet, go out to a dark apartment where there is no one, and for some reason the thought comes to me that it will always be like this. All life. And here I feel sad, bad, scared … «
I click on «stop» because … this is about me. The actress’s story triggers my inner jazz, and I easily move into my secret room. If you shine a flashlight in the corners there, you can see everything that Akhmedova was talking about. I know this well. It was like that before marriage, before meeting “my man,” before I found all the joys (and difficulties) of a couple’s story.
In the secret chamber of my soul there was a lot of dark loneliness, a career, endless travels (any new country in the world — just to run-run!), beautiful things (buy-buy!) and manifestos that I was OK to be alone.
Today, they shout a lot about women’s independence, sometimes we can’t talk frankly with a close friend, so that we are not credited with «misogyny», «anti-feminism» and so on, but … A person needs a person. Insider. In order not to stand in a dark corridor with the thought: will it really be like this forever? All life? Among random and strangers?
My exit from the chamber of secrets is the courage to accept another person next to me. It’s like turning on the light
Sue Johnson’s book Hold Me Tight is about this. About how secure emotional attachment between adults, loving people is a vital thing. Johnson writes how her colleagues lashed out at her notion that everyone has a need for intimacy. There is such a term — «codependent», and this is a threat to marriage!
My exit from the chamber of secrets is the courage to accept another person next to me. It’s like turning on the light, because for me, accepting another is about the same as accepting myself and going out into the world: out of my loneliness, out of a dark room. In a world in which, as it turned out, there is a family, love, affection. And where I am no longer afraid.