I was given a sieve when I needed a bucket

If my right wrist weren’t injured still, I’d be on a birthday climbing trip with my closest buddy. 

We finalized plans ten days ago and then I finally told him that I wasn’t sure how much, if at all, I could climb because of my wrist injury. It was hard for me to actually say this because I was afraid of losing what to me felt like “one chance of intimate time” with him. His response was to try and find alternative activites we could do in case I couldn’t climb. And then he made another suggestion: a rain-check for the climbing trip (even proposing some specific locations and crags) for when my wrist has healed and a hike & dinner for my birthday. He wasn’t bailing on me, he was actually trying to find ways to see each other while also having fun and celebrating my birthday. And on Saturday, he drove up to my town where we went for a beautiful hike in the snow and then he took me out for my birthday dinner and we discussed logistics for a winter climbing trip when my wrist has healed (& dodging holiday commitments). 

As I almost always do, I had a lovely time with him. So lovely that I then, like other times, needed a while and some intentionality to self-regulate “back to normal”. Self-regulate “back to normal” because our time together had been — as it almost always is — so intimate despite there being absolutely no sexual or romantic attraction between us. Self-regulate “back to normal” because he had shown me, concretely, so much care & love that I didn’t really know what to do with it, where to put it, how to hold it. 

This is a difficulty I have in general, with all my close friends: I struggle to let the care & love sink in, I struggle to hold onto it in a permanent way so I often end up feeling “unloved” or “not loved enough”. But it happens even more specifically with my cis-het male friends close to me in age. So I don’t really think this is a “daddy issue”. I think the problem is that I was socialized as a “cis-het girl” and thus taught to interpret love and/or care and/or attention and/or admiration from (cis-het) male peers only in terms of sexual and/or romantic attention/attraction from them. I fought this notion for decades, as early as elementary school, I can remember vividly. But still cis-heteronormativity along with amatonormativity have been polluting my brain since my youngest age. So now that I’m actually living my dream, i.e. of receiving love and/or care and/or admiration from (cis-het) male peers as buddies or comrades, on the platonic level, devoid of the romantic or sexual layers that I/we don’t want from each other, I’m unable to really hold that love because I was given a sieve when I needed a bucket.