ILLUBINARTI

The struggle was real.

When you have lived in a peaceful place for almost your entire life, you don’t necessarily develop the skills to navigate emotional upheaval. Your emotional resilience may simply never have been tested that way. You become clueless when suddenly, the things you once considered simple start becoming complicated.

Sometimes, the line between what is healthy and what isn’t becomes blurred. Too grey to name, too complicated to explain. I can deal with some of it. I can adapt, compromise, and try to understand. But sometimes, you just have to trust your gut when something doesn’t feel right.

The reality of living inside this bubble has made me learn to empathize, to look both ways, and to search for a version of peace that works for everyone. Yet somehow, it still leaves me uncomfortable. And perhaps the hardest part is that it isn’t only about me.

I brought someone else into this bubble—someone who absorbs everything he sees and feels, and whose understanding of love is inevitably shaped by the environment around him.

Love can take many forms. And what exists inside this bubble is a form of love that is new to me. It can be intense, constant, without much room to breathe. Sometimes anxious, sometimes intrusive, sometimes complicated. Strong in ways I don’t always understand. And yet, it can also be caring, kind, genuine. And perhaps the saddest part is that it is real.

I find myself longing to create a different kind of bubble—one where love feels easy, peaceful, warm. Something you can return to without having to brace yourself first. A kind of love that allows you to be fully yourself, while still making you feel safe enough to stay. 

But for someone who has lived inside the same bubble their entire life, its atmosphere becomes familiar. They learn how to navigate it. They learn how to absorb it, respond to it, adjust to it. They may not consider everything about it normal, but their threshold for what feels acceptable becomes much higher. Eventually, there is a quiet acceptance of this is simply how things are. There isn’t necessarily an urge to leave, because everything has already been understood, tolerated, or explained away.

For someone who has only just entered the bubble, however, it can feel like a completely different reality. And that difference doesn’t only affect the person who feels uncomfortable. It affects the entire system inside the bubble. 

So you try to find the middle ground. You adjust and compromise. You try to understand where everyone is coming from. But somewhere along the way, I started wondering whether finding the middle ground always means everyone has to give up an equal part of themselves. Because sometimes, in trying to make one system work, you slowly start adjusting your own values, your own boundaries, and eventually, the kind of environment you want to build around the people you love. And maybe that is what I’m still trying to understand: where love ends and attachment begins.

Attachment isn’t always love, and letting go isn’t always abandonment.