Growing up, in the simplified lessons of conservative Catholicism and childhood emotional grow, I was taught that love and hate are opposites. That they’re so opposed they cannot exist together such that, should you feel love for something, you are incapable of actually hating it, or if you burn with hatred for something, you are incapable of loving it. This was taught to me again and again as I dealt with my abusive elder brother and neglectful parents, alongside the lesson that of course I loved my family since anything less would be some kind of sin or moral failing on my part (these are equivalent in the version of Catholicism I was taught as a child), and since I had little access to people outside of my family thanks to being homeschooled, I didn’t learn any different until high school when I finally got out from under my parents’ teaching and learned from people who had different ideas and understandings of the world around us. There, as I began to develop emotionally and learn things about myself and others, I learned that the opposite of love wasn’t hate but a lack of care or concern. In fact, love and hate were two sides of the same coin, emotions so intense that they couldn’t help but overlap in ways big and small that could not only lead to some incredible opportunities for change and grace (since this was still a Catholic high school and everything was taught as close to a religious framing as possible) but also to some of the most toxic and horrible relationships that humanity had to offer (I was, after all, finally learning enough to know that my life at home was not normal or good). This mixture of emotions contributes to codependent relationships, manipulation, many different forms of abuse, and an inability to escape these things because, culturally, US society places a huge degree of importance on the power of love to overcome and redeem those who ahve hurt us.

Choosing to cut off my parents was one of the most difficult decisions I ever made. I first started talking to my therapist about it when I was twenty-four, as my depression was getting the worst it has ever been and I did not have the self-value I’ve currently built up to act as a bulwark against it. I mean, I had a mental breakdown (“minor,” of course, since I couldn’t share true vulnerability with people yet, so all anyone ever saw of it was me getting incredibly drunk one night) my sophmore year of college because I finally realized that what I felt for my family wasn’t love or even hate, it was pain and a whole lot of nothingness hidden behind the codependency that both kept me alive as a teen (I couldn’t ever consider taking my life or truly running away because they needed me and that meant I had value even if I mattered less than everyone else did) and kept me chained to answering every call and fulfilling every request until I was halfway through my twenty-seventh year. It took a longer time for my feelings about my parents to work their way to the top of the pile since dealing with the active abuse and such from my brother was a bit of a higher priority, but they eventually did and it became the central focus of unpacking and processing my childhood and teenaged trauma that took until I was twenty-eight for me to not be constantly working on it (or recovering from working on it) with every therapy session. What made all of this difficult was that, by my early-to-mid twenties, I felt every possible way about my parents. I loved them, I hated them, I didn’t care about them, they pained me, I wanted their attention, and oh so much more than all that. It took years to untangle all those feelins and dig into why I felt the way I did, slowly pulling at the threads of emotion until I could finally see that almost all of my feelings about my parents were part of what I’d had to do to survive as a child. These lessons learned were so deeply ingrained in me that they evoked emotional responses in me that were integral to playing the part my parents had cast me for. After all, if you pretend at something long enough, it eventually becomes as real in your head as anything does.

There’s no conclusion to this that doesn’t require a bunch of qualifying. It’s not like I feel nothing for my parents at this point. I still feel a deep-seated desire for their attention and approval because that sad, lonely, neglected child who learned how to survive will always be a part of me. I still feel those feelings, but in a way that my childhood self was never allowed to, with a degree of honesty and openness such that I can actually deal with them on my own. Laced through all of that is the anger and even hatred I feel at them for what they subjected me to and, more recently, their inability to actually learn during our attempt at family therapy a few years ago. It feeds into my righteous indignation and pushes me to act in ways that would feel good in the moment but ultimately accomplish nothing other than rupturing the careful peace I’ve built for myself. Which is what I primarily feel these days. Peace. Calm. Emptiness. It’s a cocoon I’ve wrapped around these other emotions that lets them out when the moment is right for that love or unmet desire or when I need to harden myself to do something difficult like engaging in a healthy but scary emotional conflict. I’m intimately familiar with how all of these things aren’t even separate things since what I’ve described is just a mental exercise meant to help me handle these conflicting emotions as they come and go, a way to parse them that will let me act in a carefully considered, self-controlled, and healthy manner.

This experience is not one a lot of people can relate to. Most people don’t entirely cut their family off to the degree that I have. Most people who do that are not trapped in what feels like the eternal limbo of thinking that maybe this could be fixed if they just tried again. I’m sure there’s still plenty other people who feel this way out there in the world, but I’ve yet to meet any of them. Still, this emotional experience is still one that is a regular part of my life and that I want to be able to relate to other people sometimes, because that kind of emotional connection can be a good way to help deal with what often feels like an isolating mix of emotions held in check by sound reasoning. Thankfully, a mixed emotional response like this is a fairly common human experience, and not always one mired in abuse, manipulation, and misery. I even have other experiences with this particular mix of emotions, though less intense and constant. Leaving my first proper post-college job evoked this mixture. It was a miserable experience for me, that final year before I moved on to something new, but I still loved a lot of the people I’d worked with and had many fond memories of my three years there. When I finally left, I felt a degree of sadness that I was leaving it behind, even though it had been a major contributing factor to how bad my depression was when I was twenty-four and twenty-five. Processing it in therapy took a similar form to dealing with my familial emotions: acknowledgement, processing, and wrapping them in a cocoon of acceptance and peace so that I could handle them as they came and went without getting myself caught in a trap of denial.

Life is full of these experiences. Intense but difficult emotional relationships. Jobs that spark your passion but burn you out worse and worse. Hobbies that take an unmaintainable amount from you but that are still beacons of joy during dark times. Your relationship with yourself as you try to grow and change in a positive way after identifying negative traits that need to be dealt with. So much of one’s live experience involves a thorny knot of emotions we spend our lives learning to deal with in a healthy, productive manner (well, not all of us do. Some of us try to fill the gaps and holes those create with money, substances, people, or whatever, and spend our entire lives trying to avoid that kind of self-reflection). Still, it’s a difficult experience to capture in a way that does it justice. I mean, Pixar’s Inside Out was huge for a lot of people because it managed to do just that, albeit in a way that was more about reflecting on the past and how the present can change how we feel about the past. Most of the time stories meant to capture these feelings gets couched in some kind of specific experience because that gives it the framing it needs to show what it is that the story’s teller is trying to communicate. Sometimes, though, you find a bit of art that speaks to this experience that manages to do so without ever getting so specific as to have a single meaning or interpretation.

These days, as I reflect on an excellent birthday and the disappointment I feel in regards to a lot of poeple I thought I was close with–all of which is bookended by contact from extended family members that has brought all this relatively settled emotion roaring back to the forefront of my mind–I find myself looking for ways to frame this and discuss it with the people around me. This is an isolating feeling–being caught in the swelter of these emotions as they roar and rage within me, shaking loose of my carefully cultivated peace–and usually sharing them helps relieve their pressure enough that I can get a handle on them. This time around, I was saved from needing that by a chance encounter with a Rebecca Sugar song from her latest album (Lonely Magic, which is great from first to last). “This Is a Love Song” speaks that this kind of emotionally complicated situation, using language that lends itself well to specific interpretation but that avoid specific details that would firmly couch it in one kind of experience, especially when the song is placed in the greater context of the entire album. It’s truly a fortuitous find for me, in the throes of this turbulance, that is slowly helping me to right the ship, so to speak, and work through the emotions during a time when I don’t feel like there’s a lot of people I can go to for support in this manner. Not because I don’t think they’d support me, but because of everything going on in the world wearing everyone down and the lack of a local support network that I’ve discovered as the people I once believed were a solid, foundational part of my adult life have slowly drifted out of it. Growing older is difficult. Maturing and growing into a better person aren’t gaurranteed. Sometimes, though, we get lucky and find just what we need to work through it ourselves.