I have managed to avoid being high my entire life. I’ve never even been buzzed. Why would I subject myself to this? I’m obviously insane. When I was younger, I typically did what my parents told me to do if I found it rational. “You shouldn’t drink or smoke,” they said. “Okay!” I said back. And that was that for decades. Little did they expect (and much to their dismay), I kept that habit through college and into my professional life. When people asked me why, I typically said it was for health reasons. At my age and with that excuse, I start to wonder if people think I used to be an alcoholic. “Cranberry juice, please!” When I got my wisdom teeth out, they put me on Vicodin. I called my father and asked when I would start to feel high. His response? “Do you feel any pain?” And of course I responded, “No.” He cheekily replied: “Then you’re high!” Nowadays, I like to tell people that I want to experience the world in its entirety, pain and all. Those discomforting signals, I tell them, let you know that you’re dissatisfied with the world and that you need to make a change. Drinking, in my view, was a self-applied control mechanism to make you docile.

I’m not quite that idealistic anymore. I’ve gone to a few beer and wine festivals, and I enjoy sipping a good Ardbeg Uigeadail on special occasion. Of course, this post isn’t about alcohol, it’s about emotions. It’s intriguing that my first experience with chemical addiction just so happened to be the quite normal and accepted “feature” of the human condition called emotional attachment. Final verdict? I’m disgusted with myself. Now that several months have gone by, I can start to look at the entire experience more objectively. The whole attachment process was so gradual that I never knew it was even happening. I’m aghast with the fact that I had so little control over the matter. For weeks on end, I felt a never-ending level of anxiety. I battled with the constant pain of rejection. Some days, I felt as though I had escaped the pain, and the next day I would be back in the thick of it. It was like an emotional roller coaster that in the end was really all my fault. I was in an emotional infinite loop. The correct course of action would have been to move on, but I kept letting the belief gremlin win, and that stoked the fire repeatedly.

The worst part of this entire endeavor? I can’t believe that I lowered myself to the dignity of a worm. In the end, she never reciprocated. I couldn’t see that until now. She first rejected me as a love interest, then as a friend, and finally as a person. I let it happen. Why was I ever attracted to someone like this? We have few things in common. To make it worse, I feel as though she changed her behavior, like a chameleon, to adapt to my interests. Was this what drew me to her? As soon as it was over, she changed and became a different person. I would never be able to co-exist with someone like that. She’s not a bad person, but she is incomplete. I am ready for more than that.

The cold detachment with which I have become acquainted over the past few months has made me ever vigilant of my own treatment of friends. Yes, it’s still a work in progress, but I care more about my connection with other people now. All my life, I’ve been rather negligent of relationships. I didn’t call my family to wish them happy birthday. I would not have any desire to call them just to chat. Now, I feel an overwhelming urge to maintain some form of connection with my family–especially my sister. Like with family, I feel a larger desire to maintain and develop more friendships. There are all types of friends: Close friends, acquaintances, work friends, and casual friends. The one governing principal of all these types of friendships? Friends respond to you. Each of them respect you enough to answer you and let you know what’s up.

I am more at peace now than I was a month ago. I feel as though these lessons are ones I should have learned when I was younger. I am still willing to move forward and try again, but I am concerned with how easy it was to find myself in a situation where I could have ended up with the wrong person. I must take this experience and guard myself and my emotions more carefully in the future.