I LOVE PEOPLE LIKE THEY’RE GOING TO DIE

When loving people this deeply starts to feel less like a gift and more like a way of slowly losing yourself.

I’m starting to believe nobody loves me the way I love them.

Whether it’s relationships, friendships, or family, I care so deeply that it sometimes physically hurts. Someone’s energy feels slightly off. Their tone changes. A text goes unanswered for too long. And suddenly, it feels like a gut punch; my chest caves in and the world around me feels like it’s collapsing.

I’ve been this way since I was a kid.

It’s as if the mere concept of life overwhelms me. Every emotion feels like someone, somewhere, has turned the dial up a little higher. I don’t just feel things. I feel them. Completely. There is no halfway, no middle ground, no dipping my toe into an emotion and pulling it back out before it becomes too much.

I can’t feel half-heartedly. I don’t think I ever have.

And trust me, I wish I could sometimes.

I wish I could be numb. I wish my brain could have a moment of respite from constantly analysing, feeling, anticipating. I wish I could stop caring for just long enough to breathe.

But the numbness never comes.

Instead, endless waves of gut-wrenching emotion that can drain me for days. I eventually heal, convince myself I’m okay, find some sense of normality and then something happens again, and I’m right back at the beginning.

A friend ignores my text or doesn’t respond for a while.

A family member shames me for having strong emotions.

A boyfriend’s demeanour shifts slightly, and suddenly I’m convinced he doesn’t love me anymore.

To someone else, these things seem small.

To me, they can feel enormous.

Because when you love people this deeply, you notice everything. Every pause. Every change in tone. Every unanswered message. Every moment where someone feels just a little further away than they did yesterday.

And perhaps that is what scares me most.

I’m so terrified of living my life without experiencing love.

Not just being loved, but feeling it. The kind that consumes you. The kind that makes you care so much it hurts.

Because I don’t know how to love any other way.

I know this sounds insane, and I probably need more therapy, but sometimes I meet someone, and we get on so well that, within a few hours of knowing them, I genuinely think I would take a bullet for them.

I know how intense that sounds.

But it’s true.

There’s something about connecting with someone that makes me attach so quickly, so deeply, that I can go from I’ve just met you to I would do anything for you in what feels like no time at all.

And maybe that’s the downfall of caring this deeply.

You will sacrifice yourself at any given moment for the chance to earn the love you crave.

You give more. You show up more. You remember the little things. You make yourself available. You bend until you almost break, because somewhere along the way, love has become something you feel you have to earn rather than something you’re allowed to receive.

And I’m not just talking about romantic love, despite the fact that it seems to be a topic I return to quite a lot.

I mean platonic love.

Family.

Friends.

The people you thought would be in your life forever.

I’ve had friends I’ve known for years who I barely speak to anymore. People who once knew everything about me, who were woven into the fabric of my everyday life, who now send a text once a month.

If that.

I know that’s part of life.

I know people grow up. People change. People move. Friendships drift. Sometimes there isn’t even a villain. Sometimes life just gets in the way.

But knowing that doesn’t make it hurt any less.

Because when you already carry this fear that you aren’t enough, distance doesn’t just feel like distance.

It feels personal.

It feels like confirmation.

See? They left too.

You weren’t worth staying for.

And maybe that’s the part I struggle to explain.

It isn’t that I expect everyone I meet to stay in my life forever.

It’s that every time someone leaves, some small, irrational part of me takes it as evidence that there must be something about me that makes people want to go.

And when you love people as intensely as I do, losing them doesn’t just feel like losing a person.

It feels like losing another piece of yourself.

Sometimes I’d go as far as saying I feel like I’m dying.

Like my heart is physically breaking and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it.

I speak to my parents about a breakup, and they tell me I jump in too fast. That maybe I get attached too quickly.

They probably aren’t wrong.

But it’s who I am. I can’t stop it.

And I think that’s the strange thing about feeling everything this intensely. It isn’t just the bad things that become unbearable. The good things do too.

When I’m happy, I’m really happy. Almost euphoric. It feels addictive, like a high I never want to come down from.

Which means that when I’m not feeling that way, ordinary life can feel painfully mundane.

Maybe that sounds dramatic. But sometimes I wonder if I’ve become so accustomed to feeling everything at full volume that silence feels wrong.

And lately, there has been a lot of silence.

I graduated with so much hope for what came next. I genuinely thought I was stepping into the beginning of my life.

Instead, I’m 23, living at home and struggling to find a job.

I chose a degree I loved over chasing the kind of corporate internship that apparently makes you employable afterwards. At the time, I didn’t think that was a bad decision. I thought enjoying what I was studying mattered.

Now I have a student loan with 9% interest, a CV I keep sending out, and very little idea of where I’m actually going.

I know this is normal. I know I’m not uniquely failing at adulthood. There are probably thousands of twenty-three-year-olds sitting at home wondering what the hell they’re supposed to do next.

But I think when you already feel things as intensely as I do, uncertainty doesn’t just feel like uncertainty.

It feels enormous.

There’s no relationship to hide inside. No university deadline to work towards. No clear next chapter waiting to begin.

Just me, sitting in the middle of my own life, wondering what I’m actually building.

And maybe that’s why losing people feels so frightening right now.

Because when everything else feels uncertain, the people you love can start to feel like the only solid thing you have.

And maybe that’s where I become my own worst enemy.

Because when someone becomes that important to me, losing them becomes almost unthinkable. So I start looking for signs that they’re going to leave before they’ve even considered it.

A change in tone.

A slower reply.

A slightly different energy.

Anything.

And suddenly I’m not experiencing the relationship I’m actually in. I’m experiencing the one I’m terrified of.

And before I go any further, I want to make something clear: I know it isn’t always my fault.

Sometimes people are just dicks.

Sometimes people lie. Sometimes they betray you. Sometimes they stop caring. Sometimes they make you feel like you’re too much because they simply don’t know how to handle someone who feels deeply.

Sometimes people leave because of their own shit, and there is absolutely nothing you could have done to make them stay.

I know that.

But I also know that my fear of being left has made me do things I’m not proud of and hurt people who probably didn't deserve it.

Because when you’re constantly waiting for someone to hurt you, sometimes you start hurting yourself first just so you can be the one in control of how it ends.

I can’t even watch a film without fast-forwarding to see the ending.

I’ll read a book and, before I’ve even reached the halfway point, I’ve already Googled whether the main female character gets a happy ending.

I need to know.

It’s like I’m incapable of trusting life to simply unfold.

Maybe it’s the same with people.

If I know how something ends, somehow I feel safer. If I can predict it, prepare for it, or even create the ending myself, then at least I have some control over what happens next.

I can give myself closure before I’ve even been given a reason to need it.

And then, when it eventually does end, I can tell myself:

I knew this was going to happen.

As though knowing it all along makes it hurt less.

As though I can rewrite the story backwards and convince myself it was always going to end that way.

Even when it wasn’t.

Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing with people, too.

Trying to find the ending before I’ve had the chance to actually live the middle.

Looking for signs that someone will leave, because if I can see it coming, I don’t have to be blindsided by it.

And maybe sometimes I create the ending I was so afraid of, just so I can say I was right.

Because there is something strangely comforting about being right about your worst fear.

At least then, you were prepared for it.

It’s a horrible way to think about love, but sometimes it feels safer to be the person walking away than the person standing there waiting to be abandoned.

Maybe I love people like they’re going to die because, somewhere along the way, I started treating every relationship like it already had an expiration date.

I know this might be a little too personal to put on the internet.

There are parts of this I’ve never really said out loud, let alone written down for strangers to read. But I suppose there’s something strangely freeing about putting the things that live inside your head somewhere outside of it.

And, honestly, most people I know probably won’t care enough to read this anyway.

But to the ones who do, whether you know me personally or you just happened to find your way here, thank you.

Thank you for letting me be a little too honest, a little too emotional, a little too much.

I’m happy to have you here.