Why I didn’t believe it and how disbelief shaped the way I let things fall apart
There’s a sentence my therapist offered me that has been sitting with me.
You don’t think you’re deserving of anything good.
I have felt the shape of that even when I couldn’t place the source. I only started to recognise it when I became a caregiver for my parents.
That time stretched everything.
Emotions sat high, right at the top of everyone’s throat. You could feel them there, ready to surface at any point; the strain of keeping them in, the way they would eventually spill out of mouths and hearts.
My role became instinctive. I steadied. I absorbed. I adjusted.
I swallowed my own feelings so I could hold theirs.
My mother who was always full of hugs, kisses, and I love yous, now forgetting my name. Navigating her movement between power and vulnerability, a shift sharpened by the tumours in her brain, bringing a temper and a frustration that left us all in a quiet kind of disillusionment.
My father, who had always moved through the world with a kind of quiet certainty, crying, fearful of an afterlife he had spent a lifetime preparing for in the pews of a Methodist church. Calling for my closeness. Reaching for my hand for comfort, for my presence, as if it could offer some protection from an inevitable reckoning.
There are some things you cannot fix.
Some things you can only witness.
So I contained myself.
You know when your sinus drains and it leaves you nauseous; heavy, unsettled, like something inside you is trying to climb its’ back out but can’t quite find its way? That is what it feels like to hold emotion in your body for too long. It doesn’t disappear. It turns inward.
The morning of my father’s funeral, I called my girlfriend Kristina. She had been there through almost all of it, the long, quiet decline, the days that folded into each other. And still, it was only then, as she was about to board a plane, that I let myself say it out loud.
That I needed her.
That I was not steady.
I waited until the last possible second.
After the funeral, my brother asked me to come back to Cayman. To be with family. To be inside something shared.
I stayed behind.
In the empty house.
In the quiet where I still felt my father’s presence, even though, in true Caribbean tradition, we had rearranged all the furniture on the night of his funeral to let his spirit go.
And still, I woke at the same time each morning.
The time I would have made his tea.
When my mother died, I returned again.
Under the guide of fieldwork.
But really, as a retreat from the work of being with it.
I went to interviews for my PhD, sitting across from her colleagues who would burst into tears when I told them she had passed.
I comforted them.
Held the moment steady for them.
And rejected the comfort waiting for me.
The safety of the people who loved me.
There was something easier about being there. Something more manageable in the immediacy of other people’s grief.
Presence asks something of you. It invites you to be seen. To be held at a time when you are not sure you could survive the feeling of falling apart. When you are not sure you would know how to come back from it.
Absence lets you remain contained. So you choose absence, because it lets you stay with the version of yourself you understand, even if she is broken.
I can trace the pattern from there, in how I learn to read a room and adjust myself to it, how I anticipate what is needed and become it, and how I keep things steady by keeping myself ‘humble’.
Disappointment stays close.
Close enough to organise my choices.
Close enough to shape how I move.
It shows up in the anxiety I feel when someone calls to ‘check in’
In the way I cut my hair each time I feel I have disappointed myself.
In the way I create the conditions for self-sabotage when things begin to matter.
I have been an absent friend when presence was needed.
I have created distance from things that were asking me to stay.
I justify it space, as time to think, to get myself together.
And sometimes it gives me quiet.
It gives me a sense of order.
It also keeps me outside of the work.
Because the work lives in being with people.
In staying in the moment where something can shift.
In allowing myself to be seen while I am still figuring it out.
Isolation becomes familiar.
Familiar can feel like resolution.
But it is not the same as understanding.
Understanding asks something different.
It asks me to stay.
To let the moment move through me instead of around me.
To learn in real time, in relationship, in presence.
There is a way I have been holding myself at a distance.
A way I have treated withdrawal as discipline.
I see it now.
And I am trying to choose something else.
Closer to people.
Closer to what I care about.
Closer to myself.
I am learning how to remain present to my heart’s voice.
I am learning how to keep showing up without rehearsing an exit.
I am learning how to resist the instinct to sabotage what I care about.
Because I deserve good things.
