why being called “codependent” was the best gift I’ve ever been given

I’ve had these ideas in my head of these “articles” I’ve been itching to write. Things I’ve been wanting to tell you, thoughts I want to flush out in front of you. And yet, I seem to keep ending up at the finish of my night, really ready for bed. 

I guess I’m doing a lot of soul work lately. It’s the kind of work where you ask yourself the hard questions about why you are the way you are, and why you do the things you do. The work that compels you to look more bravely at your childhood. To see things more honestly. To look at the role you play in your family, your relationships, and your current reality with a greater dose of sincerity. The asking of, “Why am I this way?” And, “Am I okay with that?” And maybe even, “How do I really feel about this?” 

I guess if “adulting,” is the self-formation of your own independence…and if independence means as the dictionary says, “free from outside control; not depending on another’s authority.” Or as Webster’s Dictionary puts it, “not looking to others for one’s opinions or for guidance in conduct.” Then yea…. I’d say that I’m working on adulting lately. 

A few weeks ago, I was having coffee with a new friend when he promptly stated, “you’re pretty independent, huh?” If you read the last post on this site, you’ll know that the realization I came to about my propensity for wanting to escape came after a different friend of mine made another prompt statement toward me. I’m starting to sense a pattern here… You see, when Jennifer looked at me and said, “You love Japan,” it shook me because I had spent the share hold of three months previous to hearing her say those words telling other people that very same thing. I would walk around saying, “yea, I love Japan, I would move there in a heartbeat.” I had built part of my identity around being the “girl who loved Japan.” Or, “The girl who would live anywhere and was so brave and was going to take on the world!” I don’t think anyone actually thought those things of me, but I wanted them to. I would say, “yea I love Japan, I’d move there in a heartbeat,” over and over because subconsciously I was trying to project the image that I was bold and brave and legitimately unafraid. I think for me, and maybe this applies to you, it’s easy to create rhetoric around our own lives and identities. Maybe you’ve decided you are something or people have told you that you are and you unconsciously find yourself repeating phrases that define your thoughts or characteristics. I know that’s a complicated concept, but let me refine it a little bit, I swear there’s a nugget of Gold in here if you hang on. 

I think sometimes we tell ourselves and tell the world a story about who we are that just isn’t true.

I don’t know what those things might be for you, and I don’t want to project here so I’ll just tell you some of mine and hopefully you can fill in your own blanks. Afterall, the point is to not let other people’s opinions or your own skewed ones define the rhetoric around you. For me, I have bolstered my identity in being, “self-assured, strong, and adaptable." I'm not saying that I'm not any of those things, this isn’t meant to be some kind of weird dissertation on self-loathing. But what I am saying is that because I’ve always told myself and told everyone around me that I’m, “self-assured, strong, and adaptable,” I’ve just assumed that I was “super independent,” and very sure of who I was as an individual. 

--a little interjection here, I’m finding this post so much harder to write than the last one and I know that it is because this one is so much more current. Writing about something I learned in the past, where my emotions are now distanced from the actual experience of it is WAY easier than trying to write about the messy, incomplete, sometimes embarrassing things I’m sorting through right now. But I don’t want to only present you with a cleaned up, past tense, “seemingly wise,” trying to be perfect picture of myself, my life, or my writing. Our stories, the real ones, the ones we often hide are some of the only things we possess worth sharing. The image we want people to see…the “goal body” we have in mind…the accomplishments we amass…at the end of our lives those things won’t matter anymore. But who YOU are, who you really are, and how you got here, and what your heart looks like, and the things that hurt you, and the things that healed you…those things matter, and they’re worth sharing. I hope you know that as I type those words, I’m telling myself the same thing. I’m telling myself that the Katie who waits until I drop you off at your destination and you get out the car so that I can finally unleash a slew of very relieving farts, that Katie is worth sharing, haha. What if we were that comfortable with each other’s quirks and imperfections? What if our “weaknesses” made us unique and strong, and even better than that…What if our weaknesses strung a little chord between each of our hearts to remind us that even when the world says, “be thinner, try harder, be better,” we say, “you’re beautiful, you’re wonderful, you’re messy, and imperfect, and changing all the time, and I love you for it.” What if we said that to ourselves? To our true selves? And what if we said that to each other? 

Back to it…

I never thought of myself as anything but extraordinarily independent. I was convinced that I was “self-assured, strong, and adaptable.” So, when about six months ago one of my best friends said to me, “Hey has your therapist ever discussed the concept of ‘codependency’ with you?” I was immediately thrown off. “Codependency?” I wasn’t even sure what that really meant, I had only ever heard the word used in relation to couples in which one partner was deeply entrenched in some sort of addiction. “Codependency? Come on, I mean I’ve got my fair share of ‘stuff’ and my relationships haven’t always been perfect but that seems a little extreme don’t you think?” I coolly said, “No no no, I’m not codependent. My therapist has discussed the idea of mild PTSD with me, but codependence, no.” 

The real truth is that hearing the word “codependency” jolted something in me. It felt like a label I couldn’t shake. If I was codependent, didn’t that mean something was cosmically wrong with me? Like I was now this damaged, doomed, fragile human. Obviously, this was insecurity talking. The little voice of, “you’re not good enough,” bouncing in my head. But the friend who had asked me this question is one of those forever friends, the kind where you stand in each other’s weddings, hold each other’s just born babies, and rock in wooden chairs together on a wrap-around porch at ninety-five. She knows my beautiful and especially my ugly. All the things I hide from the general world, I don’t hide from her, so when she asked me to think about “codependency,” I really thought about it. In fact, I got off the phone, searched “codependency” into Amazon books and quickly downloaded the first book I saw. 

I got about thirty percent of the way into the book, realized how scarily accurate it was, and then stopped, put the book down and for a few more months returned to the same old codependent behavior. But this time I had convinced myself that it was different, it wasn’t though, nothing changes until you change it. 

So, a few weeks ago as I sat across from a new friend and he said, “you’re super independent, huh?” I said, “yea…I am.” I wasn’t even sure of those words as they came out of my mouth honestly. But this person didn’t really know me, we barely knew each other and when he said, “you’re super independent, huh,” I couldn’t just take his word for it. When in a short period of time, one of the people who knows me most said, “you behave codependently,” and one of the people who knows me least said, “you’re super independent, huh?” I had to look at who I really am, and how I really function and how that stands in opposition to what I portray, and what I say, and what I project. 

Here’s a good example. Have you ever like really liked someone? I’m not talking like a vague romantic interest, but like reallyyyyy liked someone. You two are texting one another, it’s going great you think, and then they respond with a, “yea, for sure,” and you shoot back a, “yea, so what are you up to rn?” and then anxiously wait for their reply. As you’re waiting you think, “ok, if he’s free then maybe we will hangout tonight, he did vaguely hint at that earlier, so I’m gonna go ahead and not make any plans just in case he wants to hang out because I’d rather hang out with him than anyone else.” Two minutes go by, ten minutes go by, thirteen minutes go by, thirty minutes go by…. still no response. You click back into the text thread and try to think of something witty to say, the truth is that the conversation doesn’t need you to add anything at all, but you hate waiting for a response and it’s making you anxious. You start to run yourself into the ground with overthinking. “Did he not want me to continue the conversation?” “Do I look desperate?” “Did I word that in a way that would make him mad?” “Is he upset with me?” “He hates me, doesn’t he?” “He’s thinking that I’m thinking that I meant when he said,” ….and we dive straight into a rabbit hole of theoretical worst-case scenarios that live so far from reality. In reality, he was probably pooping, or working, or talking to any number of people he knows, or doing something a normal human would just generally do. Or maybe he just didn’t want to respond yet, and that’s okay too. But something feels unsettled, unfinished. You thought you were going to hang out with him tonight and he hasn’t even responded to your text. So, you go in for the kill shot. You do the dreaded “double text.” You type out a cool, “omg I just realized we have that paper to write for Mr. Ted’s class, have you written yours yet?” You know that double texting is classically uncool and that it may be seen as desperate or trying too hard but you’re hoping that because you asked a “legitimate” question about a class you’re both in and swiftly changed the subject that he won’t notice your desperation. 

 Obviously, this is a fake example. I’m not a student anymore and Mr. Ted is truly fictional but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t sent many a double text in my day. This scenario played out with real people has happened for me. I’ve waited and cancelled or not made plans because I’m hoping that someone, whoever it might be in that era of my life will want to hang out with me. I’ve sent those double texts that are desperately trying to seem untried and cool. I think we all have. But what I’ve learned in the past month or so about codependency is that it exists on a spectrum. We all exhibit codependent behaviors to some extent, most of it being ingrained in our behavioral patterns in our families of origin. We learn how we interact with people based on our childhoods. We learn good or poor boundaries, self-assessment, and how we love from the people who raise us, and they learn these things from the people who raise them. We’re all just playing out patterns of behavior that trickle down in the forms of both dysfunction and health from one generation to the next. The reason I give the example of “double texting,” is because it illustrates how codependency has manifested itself in my own life. I’ve always said to everyone I know that I, “hate texting,” and I do. But, it’s not just the act of texting that I hate, it’s the anxiety that often accompanies it for me. I’m a recovering people pleaser and I’ve lived most of my life feeding off of other people’s responses to me and to what I say. Texting allows other people time to respond when it’s convenient for them. Texting removes the blow softeners of tone, body language, and eye contact. Texting leaves so much more room for misunderstanding, or if you’re me…. texting leaves so much more room for overthinking and anxiety which only feeds those codependent behaviors.

Okay, one more story. When I was sixteen, I was in this super unnecessarily serious relationship. We had promise rings we had given each other, and we were convinced we would spend the rest of our lives together. He was really great, so this certainly isn’t a dig at that guy. We dated for a little over a year and then broke up and then dated again for like six months and then when I got to college, I broke up with him my first week. I can remember missing out on so many things because I was coming back to my dorm room every night to facetime my long-distance boyfriend. It took my roommate looking me in the face and saying, “I don’t think you’re happy with him,” for me to consider that maybe this relationship just wasn’t what I wanted anymore. I remember breaking up with him on facetime and I was kind of walking big circles all around what I had really intended to say which was, “I want to breakup.” And at a certain point he just stopped me and said, “if you’re going to breakup with me, just do it, please don’t drag this out.” I was stunned. “How could he say that?” “Did he not love me?” 

-This is codependency. In the same facetime where I had called to breakup with my boyfriend, I could so simultaneously feel rejected and unsure of what I even actually wanted. My feelings and thoughts were so enmeshed with his I could barely think for myself. We broke up, the next nine months were probably the most destructive of my life and then I found myself on Easter weekend with the same guy in a hotel room in Stamford, Connecticut meeting Jesus for the very first time. (That’s a story for another time though). A few months later I wrote this long, really unnecessarily spiritual letter to this same ex-boyfriend asking him to, “not talk to me unless I talked to him first.” It sounds really harsh, but as the letter explained I had realized that oftentimes I wanted to say “yes” to him more than wanted to say “yes” to myself and that it wasn’t healthy. I explained that I didn’t know how to say “no” to him and that I needed space so that I could live my life and not be constantly concerned that he was going to text me and sway my heart and change my mind. I knew this guy wasn’t God’s best for me. He was great, but we just weren’t headed in the same direction. 

We set up a time to facetime. I emailed him the letter and he read it to himself in front of me on facetime. I waited patiently as he got through all four pages, surveying his facial expressions for any sign of emotion. He finished reading, looked up at me, and with a blank expression and a tinge of condescension said, “I mean, I guess if that’s what you really need…” I was shocked. “I mean, I guess if that’s what you really need…”” That’s all you have to say?!” I thought to myself. “I just poured my heart out on a page and admitted that I wasn’t strong enough to love myself more than I loved you and all you have to say is, ‘I mean, I guess if that’s what you really need…’” I was furious. I remember my Mom telling me that he had done me a favor by being a jerk in the end. I felt assured that I had done the right thing, I grieved for a long time, and I moved on with my life. 

Well, that conversation happened almost eight years ago now and I never think about it, until very recently. As I’ve been uncovering more and more of these ingrained childhood propensities and dysfunctional codependent tendencies, I’ve had to realize that these behaviors have not been exclusive to my most recent friendships and relationships but that they have been consistent throughout my whole life, and I’m only now just understanding it at twenty-six. 

Look, I didn’t write this as release of pent up perfectionism or because vulnerability “feels good.” I wrote it because it’s honest and hopefully its helpful. I think that self-awareness and family-awareness aren’t nearly as talked about as they should be. I used to say that I was “unsettled with mediocrity,” and I still believe that, but I would probably just amend it to say that, “I am unsettled with settling for the things in my life that have caused mediocrity in my health and the health of those I love.” Life is too short to live in continued dysfunction and nothing changes until you change it. But even before that, nothing changes until you recognize it.

My ex-boyfriend wasn’t a bad guy, and he definitely wasn’t a jerk. He just wasn’t as codependent as I was. He was fine. Our relationship wasn’t controlling his life the way it was mine. I thought I was a victim, but in reality, I was only a victim of my own dysfunction. Maybe some of that’s my fault, I know some of it has to do with my family, but I’m not here to divulge that or dishonor anyone. Every parent and every family does the best they know how. All we can do in this life is the best we know how. So, here’s me showing you that I’m trying to know more things well so that I can live more freely. And I’m hoping that this blatant transparency will inspire you to take a look into yourself and your family and your relationships and your heart and why you are the way you are, and when you do I hope you won’t point fingers of blame, but you will instead say, “Okay, I am filled with weakness, I’m riddled with contradictions, I’m messy, and imperfect, and unfinished, BUT I’m beautiful, and wonderful, I’m a conqueror, and I’m changing every day, and I’m loved by God and I love me too, even right this second.” I hope when you drive someone home and you let them out of the car and right as they slam the door shut you unbutton your too small jeans and let out a fart of relief…I hope in that in that very moment you say to yourself, “I am still good enough, even right now, and the real me is worth giving to the people I love.” The me that is brave enough look my dysfunction in the face and say, “you have no idea who I am little man, I’m a fighter, and I promise you that my kids and my kid’s kids’ will be better for this soul work because I am worth the work, I’m worth the effort, and my life is just plain worth it.”