Today I understand that I was not able to claim my autonomy as a child in healthy ways. When I tried to put needed and healthy distance in my relationships with my parents, it bothered them, I suppose, because it made them feel rejected, activating their own abandonment issues, and because they thought I would never come back. Rather than support me in my journey away from them and toward myself, they rejected me for pushing them away. It made it so frightening for me to separate that I devised ways of only sort of separating. I reasoned out in my childlike mind that separation meant rejection and that I would lose the relationships I loved completely if I allowed myself to feel separate. I thought that to be close to someone I had to be like them.

I can allow myself to feel separate.

Every real object must cease to be what it seemed and none could ever be what the whole soul desired.
George Santayana