The Trial of a Performative Male

Three years ago I went through something that forced me to confront myself in a way I had not before. It was not my first encounter with this kind of attachment, but it was the first time I began to recognize that something deeper was happening, something I did not yet have a word for. I was so attached to someone that when it ended, it felt like the world fell out from under me. I stopped eating, I stopped going out, and I stopped doing anything that resembled living. I was disappearing into the idea of the person, not the person themselves. At the time, I just knew something in me had collapsed, but I could not name it.Looking back, that was when my awareness of cathexis began to form. It was not love. It was emotional energy placed on someone because of what they represented to me. It was attachment fueled by fear, expectation, fantasy, and ego. I invested so much of myself into that image that when it ended, I had nothing to fall back on but the shell I had left behind.But I reached a point where the pain became too heavy. I made the choice to take control of my body and my mind. I started running on the treadmill in my building. I ran until the other tenants looked at me with concern because I was so focused. Eventually I took it outside in the heat. I worked out. I read. I tried new experiences. I distanced myself from people who were not bad people at all. It was simply that the path ahead began to split, and I had to follow the direction that was meant for me. I gave up my apartment. And all of that eventually led to me moving to Chicago.That entire period became a kind of death and rebirth. It forced me to stop performing a version of myself that others had projected onto me. I began to live with intention and clarity. I learned to separate who I am from the image people create in their heads. I learned to see where energy was being misplaced, and where I needed to return it to myself.Only later, when I was studying cathexis for my thesis, did the pieces fall into place. Cathexis helped me name what I had lived through. It showed me how easily the ego clings to fantasies, identities, illusions, and emotional charges because it is afraid to let go. It showed me why intensity can feel like connection even when it is not. And it taught me that the body and heart know something long before the mind finds language for it.Love is presence. Love is balance. Love is two people standing as themselves, not as projections.What I felt three years ago was not love. It was cathexis. It was the part of me that was afraid to face my own silence. It was the part of me that needed to attach to something because I did not yet know how to attach to myself.Now I understand something important. You cannot love someone from a place of emptiness. You cannot give what you do not have. And you cannot receive someone fully if your energy is tied up in the past, the fantasy, or the fear of being alone.Cathexis breaks you open. But if you let it, it leads you to yourself. To accept the light and the dark within you and to truly love yourself.Three years ago I thought I lost everything. Now I see that I gained clarity, discipline, and identity. I learned to discern instead of judge. I learned to recognize projection instead of falling for it. I learned to build a life I could stand on, not one built on someone else’s image. It was not loss. It was alignment.And maybe that is what love truly requires. Not intensity, not obsession, not emotional fire. Just the courage to be present as yourself, and to let others be themselves too

What Cathexis Actually Means

To understand what I lived through, I had to understand the theory behind it.

Freud described cathexis as libidinal energy.For Freud, cathexis was the investment of sexual or instinctual psychic energy into a person, object, idea, or memory. It is the raw drive of the libido attaching itself to something. When that energy gets bound up in fantasy or fear, the attachment intensifies.

Eric Berne described cathexis as emotional energy.Berne focused on how emotional energy flows between ego states. In his view, cathexis is the emotional charge we invest into our Parent, Adult, and Child states, and into the people we interact with. When energy becomes tied up in unmet needs, fantasies, or old emotional patterns, we stop relating in the present. Intensity takes the place of clarity. Projection takes the place of connection.

Both Freud and Berne point to the same truth:we often invest our deepest energy not into reality, but into what we fear losing or what we have not yet healed.

When that energy finally returns back to us, when we reclaim it, we stop collapsing.We start aligning.