Ups, I did it again

When it is difficult to regulate dopamine in your brain, and you often suffer the consequences of its lack, you tend to cling to whatever helps you secrete it. So the danger is that you become addicted to these things. When we think of addiction, we immediately think of something that can be ingested, be it drugs, alcohol, food, and so on (many of us were hooked on sugar as children and didn’t even realize it), and while this type of addiction is very common and unfortunate, there is another type that is much less talked about, and that is the addiction to “like” someone, it’s as simple as that, your brain gets this precious transmitter from the fact that you’re sexually, emotionally, or platonically attracted to a person. Throughout my life, this has been one of my primary sources of dopamine. I can hardly remember when I wasn’t crushing. Life is so boring when you don’t like someone. I don’t really understand the chemistry of it, but there’s probably some hormone that’s released when we think about our object of desire or when we’re around them, I do, tho, understand the need. Constant craving of feeling attraction to someone in any context you are in, like, if you arrive at a party or a social event, and before you even say hello, your third eye has already done a complete scan to find a possible crush. That’s your drug, and it’s a cheap drug, and it’s very easy to access because you don’t need two people or any money to be able to use it. I learned something interesting in therapy today, that there is a type of love called “one-sided love,” which is when you get emotionally, mentally, and energetically involved with a person who does not return your love. In essence, it is a relationship that you are having with yourself. A simple example is the teen girl who falls in love with the pop star, a relationship that is obviously on one side of the court in the game of love. I believe that one-sided love and addiction are related in the sense that the former allows you to stay forever in that delicious state of longing, desire, fantasy, adrenaline, and sometimes (knock on wood) obsession that is provoked by the lack of reciprocity. In other words, you have an inexhaustible source of dopamine, a drug that only needs your imagination to work in your mind. It is, it must be said, a very democratic resource, because the vast majority of people have the capacity to feel love, even if it is fictitious, or worse, even if it is toxic. On the other hand, the feeling of abstinence can become so strong and unpleasant that you “invent” and “convince” yourself that you like someone, my God, how many times I have done it. In high school, in college, in summer jobs, in odd jobs I’ve had. In my mind, I was on a bachelorette type of show, and I was casting to choose the person who, from all the available options (or not, and there’s another problem), could become my new crush. In Chile, we said: “Peor es nada“, that means, “worst is nothing”, to refer to those relationships you have with someone you don’t really like but are better than being alone. I realize that when you are younger, you could settle for very little (this is why the first boyfriend is commonly the most toxic one). Especially in adolescence, when your identity is all mixed up, and you have no idea who you are. (As an autistic in the process of unmasking, my identity feels like this now, I’m still not clear about what I like, don’t like, want and who I am) So yes, I do make many mistakes in choosing my crushes.