Disappearing Girl by Katherine Uher

Author:Katherine Uher [Uher, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Whole Self Publishing
Published: 2017-06-20T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

“Am I the Bunny Boiler?”

Adrian and I transitioned back into friends. For a year I journaled and reflected. I felt pathetic about the desperation with which I loved people and about how I tried to control them. Everyone else I knew seemed more able to let go, to accept some degree of unpredictability in others. They had multiple interests and relationships, so that no one person meant the world to them. My relationships were all sparse, my social abilities unpredictable. I had a history of problems I didn't understand.

In my everyday life I looked to others for guidance, and so during my year of self-reflection I looked at myself through the eyes of popular psychology. I looked back over my childhood and examined the way I had been treated by my parents. I grew to thoroughly believe they were the source of my problems, that - knowing this - I could now fix everything about myself and move on and be someone completely different.

I declared that I would never again hang on too tightly to another. I expected that, with sheer self-control (something that is not my strong suit), I would be able to follow this rule. Next time I fell in love I wouldn't cling. I would do from the beginning what I had waited until the end to do with Adrian. I would let go. But I was so bad at this.

At university I had a slew of very brief, very turbulent relationships. I dated a lawyer, an electronics shop manager, a psychiatrist (who told me I had a social deficit). All my difficulties within relationships were still there. I would try to pace expressions of interest to match their own; it was hard. Other people seemed to exchange multiple phone calls a day with the people they dated. There must be a way that the rhythm of calling and effort making is established, but who establishes it?

My confusion in this area wasn't very different from my confusion about how to make friends in primary school. It was all about how to get the connection I wanted. What if the guy calls once a week and I'd like to talk multiple times a day? How is this changed? Do people talk about it? Or is their a subtlety to it? I know from my work as a psychotherapist that it is not only women on the spectrum who ask these questions. But like a dislike for loud noises, and a problem with faces, this was on another level. And so was my neurosis when it came to dating. One problem was that the people I dated often had boundaries where I still had open wounds.

While I was at my first university I dated a professor, he was in his mid forties. I liked that he was mature and grounded. I believed what we were doing was really dating, but looking back I realize he never took it seriously. He would never have told anyone about me. I

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