Grief pressing upwards like floodwaters, pooling first in the pit of my stomach. Next, squeezing my ribs. Then, rising over my throat. Filling my mouth and nose, ears and eyes, throat and lungs.
Usually, I can kick back up out of the water, find relief, choking and gasping for air.
I’ve kept my head above water with distractions, with drugs, with anything that might keep my mind off of the waves. Self-inquiry, self-compassion, and self-understanding have strengthened me, buoyed me, made it easier to stay afloat. And still, I’m tired.
I'm tired of reliving chaos in relationship after relationship. I’m tired of feeling desperate for genuine connection, safety, and love - especially when it’s being offered to me, while some part of me feels unable to receive it.
So. fucking. tired.
I’m beginning to think that this struggle - this frantic treading-water feeling - means I need a new approach.
What am I scared to find if I dive in?
Let’s back up a second.
Hey.
I’m glad you’re here. I’m glad I’m here, too.
I’m finnigan. That’s all lowercase. Officially, too
I’m a queer transsexual bigender man. I’m autistic and have ADHD. I’ve known these things about myself, and have been doing advocacy work related to these experiences, for about a decade.
I spent my teen years being a “social justice warrior” on tumblr (no, really) and moved on to DEI councils, autism research advisory boards, and sharing my life stories with you all like this. Lately, I’ve been autistically focused on neuroscience, attachment theory, complex trauma, structural dissociation, internal family systems (”parts work”), transpersonal psychology, addiction as a form of learning, neurodivergence, and interpersonal neurobiology as a whole.
If I’m honest with myself, this newsletter isn’t for any of you. It’s for me.
I wanna know what lurks in these waters that birthed me.
I wanna know myself.
Relationships are learned through experience
Interactions are connections between people at one point in time; two lines crossing in one point. A single interaction, one which doesn’t merit recollection, or rumination, and certainly doesn’t indicate another meeting to come. That stranger you passed on the street. Even far more active interactions like hooking up; few would consider a one-night stand a relationship.
Relationships, then, are repeated interactions. And they’re what forms after and between interactions. Relationships are the impressions co-created of each other, memories encoded, expectations created and compared to experiences. They’re learned behaviors AND they’re instinctual, a human tendency we all naturally reach for as infants.
We don’t consciously remember all of our experiences
Attachment begins long before birth. A gestational parent is the first relational experience a new human has. The birth process is a life transition out of enveloping nurturance (where you were enrobed by the one who carrie you) and into a cold, bright, loud, painful world. It’s enough to make most of us protest, scrunch our faces, cry out, kick our limbs - what the hell is this shit?
Everything you experienced from then on was brand fucking new. And it was usually the best or the worst thing you had ever experienced. And it just kept happening, relentlessly - your body taking over the processes that used to be done for you. No longer was your homeostasis maintained by the umbilical; now you needed to use your mouth to suckle, to cry out; your limbs to cling and grab; your mind to connect to your caregivers.
This unending, unceasing bombardance of experience is life. We expend massive amounts of energy soaking in this sensory input, filtering it through logical and emotional systems, trying to turn incoherence into understanding.
Babies’ brains are built through experience
Those first two or so years of life, infant brains are constructing the foundation for their future relational “home”. These early experiences we have - not just ‘what happened’ but also how we processed it - are the basis of our beliefs and behaviors later in life, the frameworks that we use to make sense of new situations.
And somehow I thought it didn’t matter for me that my mother died when I was an infant.
Younger me was so sure. “I mean, why would it matter? I never knew her, right? Who even was she? I can’t possibly miss someone I don’t know.”
Only as I approach 30 do I understand that my body absolutely remembers my mother.
I’ve been told that my mother adored being pregnant. That she loved me so badly. That she was so excited to meet me. That I was a deeply wanted child.
My body remembers my mother’s love the way a seed grown in the dark remembers the sun. I was nourished into existence through her.
And my infant mind encoded the experience of her sudden loss (inexplicable, terrifying, awful) into my relational foundations like so much poured concrete: even the truest, purest, strongest love can disappear overnight.
Attachment injuries disguise themselves as addiction
When you don’t understand what led to the cavernous black hole of yearning in your heart, you try to fill it.
Maybe video games work for a while. Maybe your new boyfriend or girlfriend, or sex with strangers, or putting your body on the front lines of protests, or maybe drugs will lift you high enough or drag you low enough to make it all okay.
Whatever worked last time won’t work again, not without more.
It’s this pattern of craving, desperate attempts to satiate, shame, dissatisfaction, pain, and the return to craving - that turns unresolved attachment grief into obsessive relational patterns and addictive behaviors.
Of course, this is the part where I remind you that “modern medicine” is painfully late to this basic psychological truth of consciousness: one needs only to look at the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism to see that.
I’m determined to learn, grieve & heal.
I have so many directions I want to take this. Autobiographical. Historical. Psychological. Advocational (???). Who knows.
And as much as this is for me… I’d love to know what you take away from this, what speaks to you, and what you’d like to read more of. Most likely I’ll be doing a writeup on attachment styles next, exploring what factors influence their formation and how in turn that affects behavior.
Until then, I hope you find calm waters and swim with ease.
I really enjoyed reading this!
I have a lot of similar interests in terms of attachment theory, trauma healing, parts work, etc. so I'm excited to read more of your writing in the future!
Also the "what the hell is this shit?" line made me snort 😂