My teddy bear’s head started to fall off last night.

It’s almost funny, because of the timing. I’ve had stuffed animals fall apart before, but this is the one I’ve had the longest and hugged the closest, and while he’s certainly aged, in 25 years he hasn’t lost so much as a tuft of fur. And suddenly the stitching on his neck starts to give way, and it functions as such trite and obvious symbolism for my life recently that I checked on him every time I woke up in the night, figuring it must have been a dream. Wasn’t a dream. Just a touch of hilarious synchronicity.

What you need to understand, and what most of my friends know very well, is that this bear is very, very special to me. I’d save him, in a fire, before I’d save my laptop, or pretty much anything else that isn’t actually alive. As a child I had a vast collection of stuffed animals, and I mean vast. Upwards of thirty. They all slept on my bed with me, and I would rotate conscientiously between them to make sure none of them felt left out or neglected. Choosing only a few to take with me on trips was always hard and required much thought. I won’t say how old I was when I scaled back on the stuffed-animal mania, partly because I don’t remember and partly because I’m sure that it was embarrassingly old (certainly a number in double digits, and possibly closer to 20 than to 10.)

The animals are still technically in my possession, all along the top of my old bookshelves in my parents’ house. A handful have come with me everywhere I moved. And the one, the most dearly-loved, the one I still sleep with if I’m sleeping alone, is the bear, Chocolate.

There’s a lot more to say about Chocolate, but I don’t expect it would be of general interest. Suffice it to say: I love this bear. When Tom Hanks wept at the loss of Wilson the volleyball, I totally got it. I would feel the same way if Chocolate were ever lost or destroyed. I’d get over it, I’m not crazy, and also I’m not a castaway without human contact… but for a short span of time, I would be pretty crushed with sorrow.

So last night he started to come apart at the seams, and it was a total shock to me. Dan said that this could be interpreted as a sign of psychosis, but I’m going to say it anyway: it was startling and uncomfortable to have such a sharp reminder that Chocolate is, after all, nothing but fluff and fabric.

Okay, now I’m going to try to redeem myself, because some of you are surely thinking, “She’s like a crazy cat lady but worse!” Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve realized something about myself which I kind of already knew, but never fully expressed. There’s a certain kind of energy — the kind you pour into other people, in intimate or nurturing relationships. Just like with physical or social or other kinds of energy, people have different-sized reservoirs of this energy, and it’ll vary depending on time of life and basic character and I don’t know what else. And I… I have a lot of it. A lot. Way more than I know what to do with. There have been times in my life where I’ve felt this almost physically, that I was bursting at the seams with love that had nowhere to go. It’s a weird feeling. (Does anybody else have the faintest idea what I’m talking about?)

Anyway, so in the light of these realizations, and my feelings about Chocolate’s near-decapitation, I can see that the stuffed-animal obsession was about having someone to love– lots of someones. I invented personalities and emotional needs for each of them, just so I could have emotional needs to tend to. (And I do this with a lot of other inanimate objects too. There’s a reason everything in my life has a name.) It wasn’t as if I didn’t have real people to tend to as a child– I played Lieutenant Mom to my baby brother and sister, and on the whole I delighted in that role. But even with that, I had plenty left over.

I don’t know when I really started to recognize that love is dangerous. I’d certainly gotten the message after age 12, which was the first time a boy I liked really hurt me. I value my inner peace and comfort, and am pretty protective of myself, and as I navigated my teens the voices of authority I heard were all telling me to be more protective, to hold back, to be careful. They can’t be blamed; I’m sure when I have teenagers I will be terrified at the thought of their giving their hearts to other teenagers. But all they did was reinforce my own fears. I was a lonely girl, but I was safe.

I started to break through the fears when I was nineteen and dated for the first time. From then until my graduation from college, I had a rich emotional life– much richer than it was before or since. And I learned a lot about loving real people, the complexities and the fuzzy ground and how a little pain is actually okay (and a lot of pain, while not okay at the time, is survivable.) And then I had my heart broken twice in quick succession, and I kind of went to ground again.

I feel like the last few months, since October, have been a process of rebirth. And looking at my broken bear this morning, and seeing that he is fluff and fabric, and realizing how intently I have poured my love into him anyway, because it has to go somewhere– all this has put the capstone on my new thought, which is this: I am a grownup, and I can pour my love into real people, even if they have nothing to give back, because I have a lot to spare.