The Wicked Pattern

The first time I fell in love I was about 6. I went to visit my aunt in L.A. one summer, and she had a friend, and that friend had kids, and one of those kids was my age, and that kid who was my age was a boy, and that boy was the most beautiful perfect thing I had ever seen in my short life, and within instants I knew he would be my husband.

His name was Jamie.

Since the only training I had been given in regards to love came from disney movies, I was certain that the feeling would be mutual and that we would kiss and live happily ever after. I don't remember how long we played for or what games we even played before I declared my undying love to him. I proceeded to close my eyes like they did in the movies and wait for him to kiss me. Well, no such thing happened. Instead, he ran like the wind. I obviously had no idea what was happening, so I tried following him around for a while, but he just kept running away from me. Eventually he went away for good, my summer vacation ended, I went back home to Brazil, and for the next three years littered every single paper I could find with Larissa loves Jamie encompassed by red hearts.

Since that was my first experience with love, it became my definition of love. And once we define how we believe something to be, it tends to happen just that way, over and over again, until many years later we find that we're in therapy wondering, over and over again, why we keep declaring our love to men who then proceed to run away, and why we then obsess over it for the next three years. Fascinating, isn't it. One would think we'd catch on to it sooner- I mean, really, how many times do we have to do something before we realize it's a destructive pattern and we're bringing it on ourselves???

So here I am, 18 years after Little Jamie, and if we do the math (I literally just got out a calculator to do the math), it would mean I went through this 6 more times. Well, guess what. I made a list (yes, I did), and there were 6 post-Jamie's in the past 18 years. Not as neatly, some didn't take up three years of my life (thank god), and I was a normal high-schooler who had a new crush every week and dated guys I didn't like and all that, but in the end, the pattern of declaring my love (or what I understood to be love at any given time) to a boy/man, watching him run away from me, and holding on to him for much-longer-than-would-be-understandable-afterwards repeated itself exactly 6 times in 18 years.

Now, I'm pretty obsessed with myself and my life. I've kept diaries since before I could spell the word diary. I write down everything I do, feel, see, hear, and think. I love therapy. I love anything called self-help. I'm an actress. And look, I started a blog, which is basically a structured diary for the public with an added analysis of whatever I write about. I even called it "LARISSA THINKS A LOT." You get the idea.

And yet. Somehow, I have only realized all of this right now. All these years, instead of asking myself, "Why am I wasting my time with someone who doesn't want my love?" and "Why am I not the one who runs away when he doesn't return my love," I always, repeatedly, asked myself, "Why doesn't he love me?" and, worse even, "What can I change about me so that he will love me?"

It feels really sad and pathetic to look back on all the time and love I wasted on people who didn't want it. But it also feels good to "catch it". It always feels pretty good to catch a pattern, actually. Catching it means I'm conscious of it, and being conscious of it means I now have a choice about it. I may not have a choice over who I love, or even how their rejection affects me, but I do see that I may have a choice over how I go about dealing with the situation.

So Jamie and his clan didn't want me and I tried and tried and tried to win their hearts anyway. Okay. Clearly, that didn't work out too well. And it took me 18 years to learn from the same mistake. At least I'm 24, not 74. I actually have time to do something about it.

I don't have a nice conclusion for this post, yet, since it's a new discovery and all, but I do hope that in the future I can blog about this again, and it may include some experiences with mutual, respectful love. And I can say this for now: I'm kicking this wicked little pattern out, and my heart is really excited about the possibility of letting someone in who can return its devotion, and then letting go of those who can't.