Attached - by Shade

Somewhere this year I realized I'm avoidant…which would've been useful information about ten relationships ago. For the longest time I had myself figured out as anxiously attached and honestly, the evidence was convincing. My emotions run heavy, sometimes overwhelming. I feel things loudly, even when I'm quiet about it. So when I learned about attachment styles, anxious made sense. What I didn't account for was the behaviour underneath the feeling. It took an unlikely conversation to make me look back properly, not at how I felt in my relationships, but at what I actually did. And the pattern, once I saw it, was hard to argue with. In relationships where I was chosen, where the other person was clearly more invested, where I didn't have to fight for anything, I stepped back, gave space nobody asked for. Went quiet in ways I told myself were considerate but really just distance wearing a polite face. Eventually the quiet curdled into something else: I got bored. Then later, when they started to move on, I'd feel the pull again, not because I missed them exactly, but because the distance had returned. And distance, it turns out, is the only condition where I feel urgency about a person. The chasing was never really about the person either. It was about the gap. Put something just out of reach and suddenly I'm invested. Let it get close and something in me starts looking for the exit…slowly, politely, in ways that are easy to explain as "needing space" or "taking things slow." Growing up, I learned that my emotions were a burden before anyone had to say it directly. That when someone was upset, even if I was the one with the legitimate grievance, the safest thing was to shrink. Apologize. Sometimes actively take the blame for things that weren't mine, for reasons I'm still not entirely proud of but understand better now. I became fluent in making myself smaller so the room felt safer for everyone else.What that looked like in relationships was guilt. Feeling responsible for how other people felt, like their emotional weather was somehow my forecast to manage. So when someone liked me, really liked me, no games, no ambiguity, just straightforward warmth…it felt like pressure I didn't know how to hold. I spent years projecting this outward. Reading my own avoidance as other people being too much. Reading my own pull toward unavailable people as evidence that I just had bad taste, bad luck, a pattern of choosing wrong. It took longer than I'd like to admit to turn the question around: what if the variable that keeps showing up isn't them? I'm somewhere in the middle of understanding it, which is its own uncomfortable place to sit. But there's something clarifying about finally naming the right thing, even if it isn't flattering. I wasn't anxiously attached. I was avoidant, with enough anxiety to keep myself confused about it for years.

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