self-abandonment

Georg Baselitz, Arrivare con cenere, 2019

Everything is crisper in Wyoming. There are moose everywhere, you’re not supposed to approach them. We meet a nice mom on the gondola who tells us about her son who goes to Brown and lives two doors down from the Carrie Bradshaw apartment in West Village because his roommate comes from family money and pays 90% of the rent.

It’s beautiful here but I’ve been emotional all week. Some context: since the beginning of the year, I’ve been writing about how I’m learning to experience emotion in a new way. It started last year, with moving away from S, an important but challenging friendship, and a new therapist.

I’ll boil it down to one line, which I of course heard from a TikTok. (19th century novels and TikToks are where I get 100% of my quotes these days.) “The fear of abandonment is often not so much of someone abandoning you, but you abandoning yourself once they leave.” The way I interpret that in my own life is that my problems have almost never come from how other people treat me—they come from my own attitude towards myself.