“Avoidant People Heal When They Stop Running Away”
The more love and trust I receive from others, the more suffocated I feel. It is the same in an organization. The more I blend into the team and grow closer to people, the more warmth and fear rise within me at the same time.
Behind that fear, there is a scene that plays repeatedly in my mind: the people who were laughing and talking with me today suddenly looking at me with cold, expressionless faces, becoming distant, and joining together to push me out.
It is as if I have never truly believed that I could be someone worth liking, someone worth keeping in one’s life for a long time.
Today, I was chosen as the store’s “Kind Employee of the Month.” The moment I heard the news, happiness was immediately followed by discomfort. What if I am not kind enough one day? What if people like me only because I am warm and friendly right now? Would they be disappointed if I failed to be that person later?
The aversion that rises when someone gets close to me feels deeper than a psychological issue. My body stiffens. My feet unconsciously want to move in the opposite direction. If someone links arms with me or touches me, I do not know how to react. Even if we spent an enjoyable shift together yesterday, the moment I feel that they may like me or want to become closer, an alarm goes off inside me.
So the next time I see them, I become more polite, more distant, as if no closeness had ever developed. During lunch breaks, I make excuses to rest alone in the break room, reducing the time we have to stay close together in a small space.
Once, someone described me as “an angel when she is with you, but once she leaves, it feels as if she no longer exists on Earth.” I later learned that people like this are often called avoidantly attached. Honestly, the description fits me well.
One characteristic of avoidant people is that when a relationship feels even slightly off, instead of trying to repair it, they want to leave and start over somewhere new with completely different people. Sometimes the urge goes even further: to start nothing at all and hide away somewhere entirely alone.
That is why I never stayed long at any workplace. My record was one year and four months. Now, at this job, I am approaching one year and eight months. To others, that may still seem short, but during this time I have thought dozens of times about how I could escape right now.
A few years ago, however, I impulsively quit a job and suffered greatly afterward. Since then, I promised myself not to do that again. Whenever I complain to the sky that I want to quit, a deeper voice inside me says, “You know it is not time yet.”
Until now, I was the kind of person who worked sincerely and did my best everywhere, but never wanted to truly mix with others. Yet this tiny group of seven people was different. From my first day, they asked about my family, wanted to follow me on Instagram, invited me to their homes, and even wanted to introduce me to someone for a date. It felt far beyond the boundaries I had imagined for coworkers, so I kept telling myself, “Just do your job.”
But after nearly two years in this environment, I ended up revealing myself little by little: my foolish side, my incompetent and lazy side, and my lovable side as well. Every time I showed a part of myself, I wanted to run away. Yet whenever I endured that impulse and came back, everything turned out to be okay again.
They did not look at me as if I were pathetic. Instead, they said things that showed understanding:
“Yewon, I know this still feels unfamiliar. Come with me and say hello to them. I'll go first.”
“Your calmness in difficult situations makes the people around you feel calmer too.”
“This is exactly the stage when people make a lot of mistakes. You do not have to overthink everything.”
Through these experiences, a new belief has begun to grow beside the old, rigid belief I carried since childhood. Perhaps when the day comes for me to leave this place, they will not look at me with the cold faces I once feared, but with faces that say, “We had a good time together, and we will miss you.”
The more evidence I gather that my fears are not always true, the more I am able to walk into the very places my imagination once filled with fear.
From the seed of this new belief, a small sprout has emerged, offering me these gifts:
I am someone who can keep trying for this long.
I am someone who can part from people with gratitude and meet them again later.
I am someone who can build relationships that support each other for a lifetime.
If there were times when I enjoyed studying and striving alone, then now I also enjoy living surrounded by people.
I want to become someone others can trust, and I want to meet people like that. I want to build relationships through effort and discover the joy of continuously expanding myself within them.