Love, Memory, and the Space Between: What I'm Still Learning

I’ve spent a long time thinking that love meant anxiety.

Not in so many words, maybe, but in the way that I only felt sure I loved someone when I was also terrified of losing them. When I couldn’t stop thinking about them. When I was panicking over how they felt, what I said, if I was doing enough. The loudest feelings in the room were fear and guilt, and I mistook that noise for passion. For love.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see why. I have ADHD. I also carry a good amount of anxiety and unhealed trauma—some of which looks a lot like CPTSD. For most of my life, I’ve struggled with object permanence, which in relationships becomes emotional permanence. When someone wasn’t in front of me, they vanished. And that vanishing didn’t feel neutral—it felt like loss, abandonment, failure. So I tried to keep them in my head constantly, so they could know I was thinking of them. I thought, This must be love. This constant preoccupation. This pain.

But I’m starting to unlearn that.

I’m learning that love doesn’t have to be all consuming in order to be real. That I can forget to text someone and still care deeply about them. That I can go a day without thinking of them and still want them in my life. It’s a strange, almost disorienting lesson. Because I’ve been taught—by trauma, by bad relationships, by stories—that love is always present, always heavy, always known. That forgetting is a sign of not caring. That love should feel like intensity.

That’s the lie I’m gently unraveling.

ADHD makes presence hard. Not just the physical kind, but the emotional kind. People fade in and out of my awareness like stations on a radio. I don’t want that to be true, but it is. And for a long time, I carried deep shame about it. How could I say I loved someone if I could genuinely forget they existed for hours—or even days? That didn’t sound like love. That sounded like apathy. Like failure.

But the truth is more complicated. Forgetting doesn’t mean I don’t care. It means my brain is built differently. And maybe love doesn’t always show up as a constant thrum in the background. Maybe sometimes it’s quiet. Maybe sometimes it visits like a breeze, instead of a storm.

It’s also true that trauma wires us to respond to calm with suspicion. When a relationship isn’t dramatic, when a partner isn’t upset, when there’s no crisis to solve—I sometimes feel disconnected. Like something must be wrong. But that’s not a fault in the relationship. It’s a scar in my nervous system. I’ve been trained to see chaos as connection, and now I’m trying to believe that peace is safe. That love can be gentle. That I don’t have to earn it by being constantly available, constantly useful, constantly afraid.

What I’m learning now is that love can look like stability. Like softness. Like not being in someone’s head all the time—and still knowing you matter to them.

I’m also learning that love might be bigger than the moment-to-moment intensity I’ve clung to. That it might be built on shared values, on presence when it counts, on choosing each other again and again—not on constant anxiety.

There are still questions I don’t have answers for:

• How do I tell the difference between love and fear?

• What does it mean to trust love when I can’t feel it?

• Can I love people well, even if I forget them sometimes?

• Is love still real if it’s quiet?

I don’t know. I hope so. I think so.

What I do know is this: I want love that feels like breathing, not drowning. I want to hold space for the way my brain works without believing it makes me broken. And I want to keep asking these questions—not because I’m lost, but because I’m learning.

And that, too, is a kind of love.