You Exist Too Much. Zaina Arafat

      My resistance to groups is likely a response to my culture’s fervent embrace of them, which locates value not as much in the individual as in the cohort they belong to. “Why don’t you be friends with her?” my mother would suggest, speaking of a friend’s daughter. “She has a nice crowd,” by which she meant “she has a crowd,” the distinct identities of its members less of a concern. Indeed, cliques are the norm among Arabs, but they are never easy to break into. I know—I tried, and failed. Even my cousins wouldn’t have me. After each day at the InterContinental hotel pool that summer, Reema invited Nour to sleep over, but never me. They acted as if I didn’t notice, but of course I did. Though I usually wouldn’t find out until the next morning, when I’d interrogate my mother about whether she’d seen Reema and Nour together at the hotel the night before while she dined with their mothers on the terrace. Yes, she’d respond, she’d seen them. And I would cry, because I desperately wanted to be closer to them, to stay up until dawn playing cards and watching rom-coms. But I was the American cousin, which inspired a resentment that my mother, depending on her mood, promised me was rooted in jealousy or lambasted me for, as though I had chosen to grow up in the States. Being regularly excluded, I developed a preference for solitude, one that I wasn’t so ready to exchange for the incessant company of complete strangers. I chose careers accordingly. DJing was one that worked well with my need to be alone, and also with love addiction: it limited my time with Anna and introduced me to a swathe of people who adored me, or some version of me, without expectations. With gigs on prime socializing nights I got used to skipping nights out with her. Besides, I didn’t need a partner to feel loved: I was a DJ! I was loved from a distance, the safest way to be loved.

      •

      “I’m afraid you don’t get much alone time here,” Richard said. “We’re modeled on a group system. So the four of you better get comfortable—you’ll be getting to know each other pretty well.”

      Before I could respond, he walked over to the whiteboard and picked up a marker. He drew a rudimentary tree, and at the tips of its various branches he wrote Alcohol, Drugs, Food, Sex, Love. At the tree’s roots, designated by hyperextended squiggly lines, he wrote in big block letters: CODEPENDENCY.

      “Can anyone tell me what that word means?” he asked.

      I raised my hand but didn’t wait for him to call on me. “It’s an inability to be in a healthy relationship with the self.”

      “Right,” he said. “How’d you know that?”

      In her book, Pia Mellody had made a significant effort to distinguish codependency from love addiction: While love addicts turn to a person as a drug of choice for soothing the pain of their difficult relationships with themselves, the absence of healthy self-love is itself codependency.

      “I read it somewhere.” I shrugged. “I remember things.”

      “That’s one definition of it,” he conceded. “Here we like to think of it as the pain from childhood that manifests in adulthood.”

      “So unless you grew up in a 1950s sitcom,” I said, “you’re codependent?”

      Richard forced a laugh. “It’s true that most people have unresolved pain from childhood. But not everyone ends up self-medicating with one of these.” He ran the capped marker back over the words at the ends of the branches. “The goal is figuring out how we got from the root of the tree to the branches. From codependency to addiction.”

      We began by telling our life stories. “There’s no time limit on how long you have, just however long you need to take,” Richard said as I clenched the edges of my chair. Having known these people for less than twenty-four hours, I wasn’t too enthused about hearing their entire personal histories. I assumed everyone else must’ve felt the same way, but to my surprise, they seemed engaged, leaning forward attentively to listen to one another. Though I mostly scribbled in my notebook and did equations, calculating the cost per hour of being there, I picked up bits and pieces.