Amy Eden offers a deeply personal look at how abandonment in childhood later played out in her relationships.  But she learns to deconstruct her “urge to flee” and stay present instead.
—
First you’re abandoned, then you live with an urge to flee.
I have spent my entire life anxiously ready for things to fall apart.  My shoulders are never completely without tension, same for my eyes in their sockets.  There’s always the potential for a need to leave. I have spent my entire life ready to bail out, to get out, to save myself. To run. I’m sitting in the back of the restaurant facing the door and patrons, ready, at all times, for The End.
I should have sought work in a hospital emergency room as something.
I have ended many relationships in an angry flourish that lived up to that anxious anticipation, heaping a longtime on-and-off again boyfriend’s belongings outside my locked apartment door in NYC, walking out of a bar mid-conversation on a man with whom I lived and not returning home that night in Cambridge, or by lashing out in writing, with agony and bile, to end things in San Francisco…in a satisfying manner that justified the hell I’d supposedly

Originally published at http://loveandlifetoolbox.com