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Every relationship I've had, I disappeared into. I thought that was love. It was fear. I have a theory about myself that took me a long time to admit: I don't fall in love with people. I fall into them. Completely. Immediately. Without a lifejacket. Within weeks of meeting someone, my world reorganizes itself around them. My plans become their plans. My interests start to mirror theirs. My friends hear from me less. My own thoughts get quieter. I tell myself it's because I'm a loving person. Devoted. All-in. But the truth — the one I've been avoiding — is that I don't know who I am when I'm alone. And being alone terrifies me more than losing myself ever has. The pattern is always the same. I meet someone. I feel that rush — finally, someone who sees me — and I give everything immediately. All my time. All my attention. All my emotional energy. At first they love it. Who wouldn't? I'm attentive, present, completely focused on them. Then something shifts. I start to feel the anxiety underneath the love. The constant need to check: are we okay? Do you still want me? Why haven't you texted back? What did that tone mean? I need reassurance in a way that I know is too much. I can feel it being too much. And I give it anyway, because the alternative — sitting with the uncertainty — feels unbearable. Every relationship has ended the same way. Not because I wasn't loving enough. Because I was too much — too present, too anxious, too focused on the relationship as the thing that would finally make me feel okay. And the cruel irony is: the more I clung, the more they pulled away. The more I needed reassurance, the less safe they felt giving it. The more I made the relationship my entire world, the more suffocating it became. I destroyed the things I was most desperate to keep. After the last one ended, I sat in my apartment and tried to answer a simple question: What do I actually like? Not what we liked together. What do I like? I couldn't answer it. I had been so busy becoming whoever each person needed me to be that I had no idea who I was underneath all of it. That was the loneliest moment of my life. Lonelier than any breakup. I started working on the actual problem. Not "how do I find the right person." But: why does being alone feel like a threat? What am I running from when I disappear into someone else? What would it mean to be with myself — fully, without distraction — and find that enough? It's ongoing work. I won't pretend otherwise. But for the first time in my adult life, I'm in a relationship — with myself — that I'm not trying to escape. You're running a pattern that made sense once. And you can change it. That moment where you start waiting for a message a little too long. Where your mood quietly depends on how someone else responds. Where being alone doesn’t feel neutral — it feels like something’s wrong. I used to think that was just love. Or just how I am. It wasn’t. It was a pattern I never really questioned. I only started to see it when I looked at it more directly. I found a short quiz by Liven and took it without expecting much — just curiosity, more than anything. It didn’t give me a label. But it gave me language. And that was enough to start changing how I show up — with other people, and with myself. If this feels close to home, it might be worth a look. Link below.