Being in love crazy – obsession with unrequited love

I believed that what I had felt at the time was a form of erotomania, it would seem that it was not:

Definition of Erotomania:

Erotomania, or Clérambault syndrome, is the delusional belief of being loved. Far from the obsession with unrequited love, it is a form of paranoid psychosis of the category of passionate delusions, where hatred of the other is, through a reversal of subjective positions, disguised as an "illusory conviction of being loved". In the same way that in the delirium of persecution the individual is persuaded to be the object of imaginary malevolence, the erotoman is persuaded to be the object of a loving benevolence, just as delusional, on the part of others. (Wikipedia)

deux oursins qui se disent bonjour sur une plage de Corse
These little sea urchins have crossed the entire Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean to finally find each other. What a beautiful love story! I dreamed of such a beautiful story that would save me!

I didn't feel like I was loved by this girl, but I was attracted to the point of obsession, I don't know if what I experienced has a name.

I had fallen in love with a girl who lived far away, who was in the city next door, where when I was little, it was the end of the world, the fact that she lived in this city made me feel like she was a distant girl, a little cold, mysterious and attractive, a bit like when we envy as a child those who take risks to do stupid things quite daring, when even, it would scare us very much and it would bother us to do them. In some ways, I felt she was like me, about being kind and tolerant. So she gave me the impression that she could overcome the disturbing things because she lived far away, in this disturbing environment for me, wilder. It made me feel like she was one of those people who arrived, without seeming to force herself to be strong in situations where I was deeply worried, and that worried me and at the same time attracted me. Yet she seemed to be like me, she was both familiar and extraterrestrial (because she managed to overcome this kind of fear), I was in admiration in my mind although I tried not to show it.

What made me think that she was like me was that she had, according to her testimony, the impression when she was in her high school (the same as me) that others were acting, a bit like the derealizations I experienced…

… before she left high school to teach at the CNAM remotely. For me who felt totally extraterrestrial compared to others, completely not normal, the fact that she had this same symptom as me gave me the impression that she was like me, it created a reassuring side, I think she left high school because these derealizations became unbearable for her, as for me. She had had this chance to leave these things that made her suffer, maybe that's what saved her and that she had healed unlike me whose life was screwed. It hurt me to tell myself that. So I should have fought against myself, and told my parents that I no longer held and that I wanted to stop high school to do it at the CNAM, when it would have extremely bothered me to do this out of modesty not to want to show that I was crazy to my parents since I felt my discomfort as disturbing, ashamed. So I felt guilty for not having done this, when it would have deeply bothered me to do it, but maybe also a helped enough because it is true that I lived very very badly in high school, with the fear of people's judgments, the intense stress of getting angry by the teachers as I rarely did my homework, the stress of getting up early.

I was crazy that if I went out with her as we were the same and I told her about my life, it could have saved me… At the same time I felt that it was a crazy belief to hope for this, but I was desperate.

Un coeur dessiné dans le sable avec un L au milieu
Ahhh, who's in love with L!
A form of jealousy:

The extreme fear of seeing, of imagining myself, the girl I was in love with and who seemed, in my mind, to have the same frailties as me, and perhaps the only one on earth to be like me, to be comfortable in situations where I was terrorized created a kind of dread for me. It made me say that I was lost forever, the only one on earth to be like this and that this girl was able to escape narrowly but not me. For example, having a job, making love, or imagining that in her boarding school she makes partouzes! it hurt me, I felt like I was the last psychically fragile and ridiculous idiot on earth, that it was not normal to be so worried and that it had been silly to imagine that she could be like me. I felt completely dropped, overwhelmed. I was afraid of ending up in a psychiatric hospital plagued by constant terror, not the others. I was the last silly guy to have crazy meaningless thoughts.

I wondered: is this normal jealousy? Do others feel this way when they are jealous? I thought that I certainly wasn't and that was one more reason to think that I'm serious.

I saw myself, as usual, responsible for this madness in me, and I had to try to prevent it, I imagined that others would have resented me, would have found me null, if they saw all this madness in me, I rejected myself, I disagreed with myself, I had to change internally.

I felt guilty continuously, not a moment of respite to tell myself that in this story, basically, I was the victim, the victim of my psychiatric illness and have a little sadness of it. Even the pity towards me disappeared little by little towards fear and it worried me to see myself disappear.

Un dessin représentant deux visage, celui d'un homme se portant droit et une fille posée sur son épaule
Contact with a girl stressed me a thousand times, impossible to be serene, although my libido could make me want to cuddle some girls :). I would have liked to be laid back and enjoy a calm romantic relationship.
It didn't scare me too much to imagine someone different from me not being afraid of life and not being afraid in society, but there she was like me.

I was dehumanizing these people that I didn't feel like me, they didn't have the same value, they didn't really matter, even if I didn't want to hurt them. They didn't have all my knowledge of what is right, that you have to be tolerant, that it's important to be tolerant, that you always have to find a way to agree between people, and that gave them less value in my eyes, and then as he was not really like me, I wasn't trying to figure out how they felt like I was doing with this girl etc.

I thought of her and her gaze judging me, I was afraid that she would judge me as a different person that she could then have despised because I was one of the non-tolerant people, those who did not like children, who could be racist, those who want to do banal jobs and not medicine or nursing (she wanted to be a nurse) because in my mind it was the only valid professions to really do good, indeed all scientific professions, I thought, risk leading to the end of the world because, one day, of the power of science.

dessin stylisé d'une sirène au dessus de la mer très agité et d'un paquebot
Love was a crazy and unpleasant obsessive utopia!

I was terribly afraid to pass in his mind for an asshole, this is one of the reasons with the fear of the danger of other scientific disciplines in the long term that pushed me to do medicine, a crazy reason that will create discomfort later.

This judgment of being seen as an asshole in her eyes obsessed me, and if I had been in contact with her, I would always have been afraid of this judgment, and I would always have sought to persuade her that I was not an asshole.

I was making movies on a loop where I told myself that if I saw her and if I tried to persuade her that I was not an asshole, when there is somewhere no reason for her to think that, then she would take me for a fool to want to persuade her of this and that I have this fear all the time, so I couldn't stand what I imagined of her judgment that she took me for a madman, that I could not stand it and that suddenly I try the person that I am not a dangerous madman and so on.

Although the few times I saw her, she seemed nice, I dreaded her judgment he totally obsessed me, as if he was mean and I had no right to tell me that she was going to cook an egg.

I wouldn't have been mean in practice. I was afraid to be one of those erotomaniac madmen who apparently end up killing their lovers as I heard once during my medical classes, in my mind the erotomaniacs were seen as sick people who end up killing themselves or their lover. I had impulse phobias and it was one more argument in my mind to be afraid that one day I would go crazy and kill her. I would never have killed this girl, but for sure, without treatment, the fear of her negative judgment on me would have obsessed me endlessly.

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