369. why change comes late
Here is a question I was asked recently: “Why did all of this have to happen for him to change?”
It's a question usually asked with more grief than curiosity because the answer, whatever it may be, cannot undo what happened. It can't return the years someone spent waiting, restore the trust that slowly eroded, or give back the relationship that might have survived if the change had come sooner. What makes the question so painful is the possibility that he was always capable of becoming different, yet somehow remained unable or unwilling to confront himself until the consequences became irreversible.
People often change only after the life they assumed would continue begins to fall apart. Before that point, there are countless ways to avoid a deeper reckoning. They can make promises, correct the most obvious behavior, blame stress, point to circumstances, or convince themselves that the relationship is simply going through a difficult period. Even when they know something is wrong, they may still believe there will be more time to fix it. The future feels secure enough for change to remain important in theory without ever becoming urgent in practice. Loss removes that illusion entirely.
When someone leaves, especially someone whose presence had become inseparable from the future you imagined, the pain extends far beyond missing them. You lose the life you expected to have, the version of yourself that existed beside them, and the assumption that you would eventually become the person the relationship needed. The distance between who you were and who you believed you still had time to become suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.
My last relationship did that to me. I was already trying to better understand myself before it ended, but I had never been forced to look as honestly or as deeply as I did after she left. The breakup ripped through me with a force I was completely unprepared for. In the days that followed, the pain spread beyond the immediate loss and reached places I hadn't realized were still vulnerable, bringing thoughts and feelings to the surface that were much older than the relationship. I remember sitting on the bathroom floor, rocking back and forth, crying uncontrollably and repeating the words, “No one loves you.” I knew I was grieving her, but I could also feel that something deeper had been uncovered, something that had been shaping me long before she became part of my life. Once it was exposed, I could no longer return to the version of myself who had learned how to live around it.
A loss like that can create an awareness that becomes impossible to ignore. It strips away the explanations that once allowed us to remain unchanged and brings us closer to pain we have spent years working around, compensating for, suppressing, or disguising. The deeper wounds were already there, but the distractions that kept them out of view were suddenly gone. For the first time, we may have to decide consciously what we are going to do with everything that's been uncovered.
In the aftermath, I started asking questions I had not known I needed to ask while I was still in the relationship. I had to look at how I showed up, what I avoided, what I said or didn't say, and how much of my behavior had been shaped by experiences from my past that I had never fully understood. When we leave those experiences unexamined, they do not remain neatly contained inside us. They shape how we move through the world and relate to others — in what we avoid, in what we tolerate, and in what we struggle to express. Over time, they can quietly influence the outcome of something we care about without us ever recognizing their presence.
Looking at ourselves this way involves identifying what belongs to us without assuming responsibility for every part of what happened. Relationships are more complicated than a clean division between the person who caused the damage and the person who suffered from it. Honest reflection requires enough maturity to acknowledge the places where we were hurt while also examining how our unresolved issues influenced what we tolerated, what we concealed, and how we responded. The purpose is understanding rather than punishment, because turning the entire relationship into evidence of our own failure would distort it just as much as refusing to accept any responsibility.
There is a point at which defending the person you were becomes more difficult than becoming someone new. Remaining unchanged requires you to keep explaining away the consequences of your own behavior, even after those consequences have taken something deeply valuable from you. You have to continue treating familiar patterns as permanent features of your identity despite growing evidence that they are costing you the life you want. Change becomes possible when the pain of protecting the old self finally exceeds the fear of questioning it.
Although the question was asked about a man, the deeper pattern is human. It may appear especially often in men who have learned to avoid emotional introspection, suppress vulnerability, or treat self-examination as something they can postpone until a crisis makes it unavoidable. Even then, the capacity to live around our wounds until their consequences become impossible to ignore belongs to all of us.
Pain alone cannot determine what someone becomes afterward. Some people respond to loss by growing more resentful, guarded, or determined to avoid vulnerability in the future. They search for someone else before understanding what happened, repeat the same patterns in a new relationship, and use every disappointment as further evidence that the problem has always existed outside of them. Others allow the pain to become a point of examination. They look at what happened, what they contributed, what they ignored, and what they will continue carrying unless they make a deliberate effort to change it.
Perhaps the depth of change available to us is sometimes connected to the amount of certainty the loss destroys. Smaller disappointments generally require smaller corrections because the structure of our identity remains mostly intact. When an experience is powerful enough to dismantle what we believed about ourselves, our relationships, our future, and our sense of belonging, returning to the old version of ourselves may no longer feel possible. We're left with the difficult opportunity to decide what deserves to be rebuilt and what should finally be left behind.
There is no reason to romanticize that process. Growth can't make the loss fair, and the lessons that emerge afterward can't compensate the person who spent years waiting for us to learn them. Becoming more self-aware after the relationship ends doesn't give them the partner they needed while they were still there. That may be one of the most painful truths about change: the person whose absence awakens something in us may never receive the benefit of who we become because of it.
I feel like I'm building myself into the man who would have been capable of making my last relationship successful. I believe the person I'm becoming is someone who could have created a relationship worth staying in because I am finally addressing the parts of myself that made it difficult for me to show up fully while we were together. That belief carries its own kind of grief because I can see qualities developing in me now that might have changed what was possible between us then.
That thought is complicated because I don't want my growth to become an attempt to reshape myself around what she wanted or needed. I did enough of that during the relationship, and continuing it now would preserve the same underlying problem. The man I am becoming is more honest about what he feels, more capable of expressing what he needs, and less willing to disappear in service of maintaining connection. I believe those changes could have allowed me to love her better and create a relationship she would not have felt compelled to leave, but their value cannot depend entirely on whether they would have saved what we had or whether she ever returns.
Healing must remain meaningful even when reconciliation never comes. When the work depends upon recovering the person who left, it can easily become another attempt to control an outcome that no longer belongs to us. Lasting change requires accepting that the past can't be revised while allowing what happened to shape the way we move through the future. The relationship may be over, but the awareness created by its ending can still determine whether the same wounds continue directing the rest of our lives.
So why did he change?
He changed because he lost something meaningful enough to make him question the person he had been. He changed because the future he assumed would remain available disappeared, and its absence forced him to see the cost of continuing along the same path. He changed because advice, patience, conflict, and repeated opportunities had never reached the place that grief finally reached.
It shouldn't always require devastation for someone to confront themselves, but human beings are remarkably skilled at postponing difficult truths while their lives remain mostly intact. Sometimes the collapse of what we hoped to preserve is what finally makes avoidance impossible. By then, the change may have come too late to matter to the person we wanted to spend our life with, but it's still possible for it to matter to the life we have left.
The loss can't be undone, and the person who left doesn't owe us another chance simply because we finally understand what they had been trying to tell us. All we can do is decide whether the pain will become another wound we carry forward or the moment when we finally stop allowing our wounds to choose our future for us.
366. to mourn what never was
How do you grieve something you never really had?
I don't know if there is an easy answer to that because this is a difficult kind of grief to explain. It is not rooted in losing something you clearly possessed, but in slowly accepting that something you wanted was never fully there to begin with. It's the grief that forms around an absence that still managed to shape your life: a role that existed in name, but never became what it was supposed to be, or a possibility you organized your hope around for years.
What makes this kind of grief so difficult is that there is often no obvious ending to point to. The pain comes from recognizing the gap between what you thought should have existed and what actually did, and realizing that a relationship, a title, a role, a dream, or a promise can exist in name while never becoming the thing your heart needed it to be.
There are many forms this can take. Sometimes it is finally accepting that the future you assumed would eventually arrive never will, and that acceptance is where the grief begins. Sometimes it is realizing that a role, title, or relationship carried a promise in your mind that reality was never able to fulfill. And sometimes it is recognizing that a dream you quietly spent years organizing your life around may never become reality.
An athlete may grieve the championship they spent years pursuing but never attained. Someone may grieve the career they built their identity around, only to discover that success didn't bring the fulfillment they expected. A person may grieve the body they kept believing would eventually feel like home, the apology they never received, the childhood that never felt safe enough to simply be a child, or the version of themselves they thought would appear if they could only become disciplined enough, impressive enough, or useful enough. In each case, the grief is not only about what failed to happen. It is about how much of life became organized around the expectation that one day it would.
Grief on its own is difficult because it asks you to live with the loss of something that once made the world feel more whole. But this kind of grief carries its own confusion because nothing technically disappeared. The loss can't always be seen from the outside, no matter how deeply it is felt within. There may be no clear date, no dramatic ending, and no obvious evidence that would lead someone on the outside to realize you are struggling with it at all.
What makes this kind of grief so hard to name is that, over time, you realize you are not mourning the loss of something you once had, but the absence of something you deeply wanted, expected, or built your life around. You are mourning the distance between the role something held in your life and the reality of what it was actually capable of being. That gap can exist between a dream and what effort could realistically produce, between an identity and the sense of wholeness you expected it to provide, or between the title a person holds in your life and whether they are actually able to fulfill what that title implies. The grief emerges when you finally accept that those two things were never the same, and that no amount of hope, effort, or patience could make them overlap.
I've been thinking about this because I recently came to a realization that was both obvious and devastating at the same time: my father is not capable of being the kind of father I needed him to be, though the truth is I don't even know how to define what a father is. I only know that when I imagine the kind of example I would want to set for my own children, he's not the model I reach for.
That is a difficult thing to admit because it feels wrong to want something that, in theory, I should have. I shouldn't have to wish for a mature parent. I shouldn't have to be more emotionally regulated than someone old enough to know better. I shouldn't have to navigate outbursts, manage another person's emotions, or be the steady one in situations where I was should to be the one receiving guidance.
But over time, and especially after a recent interaction where I had gone out of my way to help only to be met with behavior that reminded me of this pattern yet again, I realized that I was not just dealing with a frustrating moment. I was confronting a much larger truth. The painful part was not the interaction itself, but realizing that I was still holding onto the hope that one day maturity would appear where it had always been missing, and that maybe this time I would finally get the father I had been waiting for all along.
But it didn't happen, so I walked away. And I am proud of myself for leaving, but I am devastated that leaving was the healthy choice.
Not because one interaction was enough to explain everything, but because sometimes a single moment becomes the clearest expression of a truth you have been circling for years. It was not only about being disrespected, or about realizing that I had handled the situation better than I once might have. It was the recognition that I was still waiting for something from someone who had already shown me that he did not know how to give it.
There is something deeply painful about realizing that self-respect may require you to stop making yourself available to something you still wish existed. It is not the same as not caring, becoming cold, becoming bitter, or deciding the whole thing never mattered. Sometimes it hurts specifically because it did matter, because you did have an idea in your head of what you wanted it to be, and because some part of you kept hoping that more patience, more effort, more understanding, or more self-control might eventually create the conditions for the thing you needed to finally appear.
But there comes a point where hope can become another way of abandoning yourself, especially when the evidence keeps mounting.
Part of what makes this so painful is that you eventually have to confront the role your own imagination was playing. Not because imagining something better was wrong, but because you may have spent years treating possibility as evidence. You may have built routines, expectations, and emotional habits around the assumption that if you kept showing up differently, understanding more, trying harder, or waiting longer, reality would eventually meet you where your hope already was.
Sometimes it feels upsetting before it feels freeing because you have to admit how much of yourself was organized around a possibility. You have to admit that you were not only responding to reality, but negotiating with it. You were trying to make the facts less final by giving more of yourself to the version of the story you wished were true instead of the one you were actually given.
A son may have to grieve that having a father does not mean having someone fatherly. A person may have to grieve that becoming more accomplished did not make them feel more worthy. Someone may have to grieve that the love they kept trying to earn was never going to become safe just because they became easier to love. These are not small losses simply because they are invisible. In some ways, they may be harder to process because they require mourning both the absence itself and the identity that formed around surviving it.
To grieve something you never had is to stop asking your imagination to keep compensating for your reality. It is to stop using potential as proof. It is to stop treating a person, a dream, a title, a goal, or a future as if the version that exists in your mind is more authoritative than the version that keeps showing up in your life.
That does not mean the desire disappears because you finally see it clearly. Nor does it mean the need was childish, the longing was foolish, or the effort was wasted. It does mean you stop sacrificing yourself to keep the possibility alive. It means you allow yourself to accept that wanting something deeply does not obligate you to keep giving your life to the version of it that continues to fail you.
For some people, that realization may feel disorienting because it changes the story they thought they were living inside of. For others, it may feel less like a discovery and more like an exclamation point at the end of something they have known for a long time. Either way, there is a particular pain in accepting that what you wanted was real to you, even if it was never fully real in the world.
The need was real. The longing was real. The effort was real. So, the grief is real, too. And the work is not to convince yourself that it didn't matter. It is to admit that it did, and learn how to stop giving your life, effort, care, and imagination to something that has already shown you what it is.
362. nothing as whole as a broken heart
It’s been said that there is nothing as whole as a broken heart. That might not make sense to everyone. But it begins to make sense after you have lost someone, or something, that had become woven into the life you thought you were building. The breaking is painful because the life attached to that person or thing breaks too. What follows is the quiet work of sitting with the pieces, examining what they reveal about you, and slowly learning how to put life back together in a way that makes sense again.
I don’t think I could have understood this idea fully without having my own heart broken. To be fair, you don’t come to this conclusion up front. In the moment it happens, there is no wholeness to be found. There is only pain, confusion, grief, and the strange feeling of trying to figure out how to continue moving forward in a life that no longer makes any sense. The wholeness comes later. It comes in the aftermath, as we’re forced to sit with ourselves, question our part in it all, and slowly put the pieces back together with more honesty than we had before.
That is part of what makes heartbreak so devastating. The situation doesn’t only take something from us. It reveals something to us. The moment something breaks, the life we thought we had control over loses its certainty, and the ideas we had about ourselves become harder to protect. What we thought we understood about who we were, what we needed, what we feared, or what we were attached to suddenly becomes more complicated. The things we were able to ignore before become much harder not to see.
In that way, heartbreak can do more than shatter our lives or break us apart. It can also break us open. It can allow us to see ourselves differently and begin the process of making our broken heart more whole.
I wrote a letter once to someone I loved after the life I thought we were building had unraveled. It said:
“Who you knew isn’t who I am anymore. It’s funny how life can change in an instant, and in one of those instants, on an ordinary night that felt like the end of everything, something in me broke open instead of just breaking apart. I saw who I’d become, and in the same breath I realized I didn’t have to stay that way. That moment hasn’t fixed anything yet, but it changed everything.”
Breaking apart doesn’t mean you’re broken forever. It can become a step toward a deeper understanding of yourself. It can expose what was hidden underneath the life we were trying to hold together as the walls we were hiding behind begin to crumble. The ego, fear, assumptions, and expectations that kept us from seeing ourselves clearly are no longer things we can hide behind. Instead, we’re left staring at the pieces of ourselves we avoided, defended, or mistook for who we were.
That opening forces questions. How was I showing up? What did I overlook? What things didn’t I say, and why was I scared to say them? These aren’t easy questions to ask when you’re already hurting, but when your heart breaks into a thousand pieces, they become impossible to avoid because those are the pieces you’re left trying to understand.
Those questions are not theoretical for me. They are questions I have had to sit with, not because I wanted to turn heartbreak into some lesson, but because the breaking left me with parts of myself I could no longer avoid. And, that's the part of heartbreak I am still trying to understand. My heart broke, and it hurt in a way that made me question my life itself. It was devastating, and it still hurts. But I can also see that it showed me parts of myself I may not have been willing to face otherwise. It broke the image of who I thought I needed to be. Once that image shattered, I had to rebuild from something more honest. Not who I wanted to appear to be. Not who I thought I was. Not a version of me I was trying to protect. But who was actually there.
And, just because heartbreak can lead to something positive doesn’t mean it needs to be turned into a lesson too quickly. It’s important to understand that there is no timeline. Some pain deserves to be felt before it is explained. However, I do think there is always something to be learned. There is a kind of wisdom that only becomes available after life breaks a version of us that we were trying so hard to keep intact.
So, I think it’s true that a heart that has been truly broken may become more whole than one that has never been touched by pain because it knows itself more genuinely. It knows what it means to love something deeply, to grieve honestly, and to rebuild without pretending the breaking never happened. It carries the memory of pain, but it also carries the evidence that it survived.
That is the wholeness of a broken heart. Not that it is unscarred, untouched, or perfectly healed, but that it has been opened enough to see more of life, more of others, and more of itself than it could before. Heartbreak isn’t meaningful because it’s painful. It’s meaningful because, if we let it, it can reveal something true about ourselves.
357. grief
Grief isn't just an emotion. It’s what fills the space where something once lived and no longer does. It arrives in the hollow space left behind, taking the shape of what’s missing, its depth equal to what used to be there. The more weight something held, the more grief it leaves in its absence. In that way, grief becomes its own kind of proof. It floods the empty spaces with the weight of what mattered.
In the beginning, it feels unbearable. Not in some distant or poetic sense, but in the way certain moments leave you unable to gather yourself around what has happened. Like you’re suspended inside something that won't let you return to the version of life you knew before. There’s no language sufficient for that kind of pain because it isn't just sadness. It's shock, longing, disbelief, memory, and love all colliding in the same place with nowhere to go.
Over time, the sharpest pain may soften, but that doesn't mean the loss disappears. What remains isn't only the ache of who is gone, but the imprint of who you became through loving them and who you were forced to become after they left. That’s part of what grief preserves. It keeps contact with what was. Not perfectly, but faithfully. It's the quiet and constant reminder that something once touched your life so deeply that it left you altered.
People say you move on, but I don't know if that's always true. Some things don't leave you in a way that allows you to simply move forward. They leave their mark. They become part of your inner world. They change the way you move through life. Some losses can't disappear, and perhaps they shouldn't. There are some people who can reach so far into you that their absence isn't something you overcome. It's something you learn to live with. Something you carry. Not because you’re unable to let go, but because what was there was real enough to leave a permanent impression.
That type of love doesn't disappear, but it can't stay the same either, so it changes form. It remains in the memories that arrive uninvited, in the reflex to reach for something that is no longer there, in the silence that now answers moments that once would have been shared, and in the disorientation of still carrying a bond that no longer has a place to land. It remains in the strange way pain can feel unwelcome and precious at the same time. Because however hard grief is, there’s something equally unbearable in the thought of losing that too. As if the fading of the pain might mean the fading of the person and the dismantling of what they meant. It’s not weakness, nor something to hide. It’s evidence. It’s what remains when love had enough weight to matter.
There’s no right way to be all right. No clear path. No defined timeline. Some days grief is heavier in obvious ways, as memory brushes against something you can't control. A car that looks like theirs. A song. A place. A future that once held both of you and now only holds one. And in the sound of their voice you're afraid you're beginning to forget. Other days, grief takes a quieter form, hidden beneath movement, distraction, and the attempt to stay too occupied for memory to catch up. Even gratitude can hurt, because to be grateful for what you had is also to know what you’re unable to return to.
And still, I think grief deserves to be honored, not erased. Because if you could simply discard it, or fill that void with something else, then perhaps what was lost never reached that deeply to begin with. The pain isn't the whole story, but it is part of the proof. It testifies to the depth love was allowed to reach. Maybe healing isn't moving past it. Maybe healing isn't forgetting, dulling, or making it smaller so that life feels easier to explain. Maybe healing is learning how to carry love and loss together without demanding that one cancel out the other.
You don't heal because they no longer matter. You heal, if that is even the right word, by finding a way to go on without betraying what they or the connection meant. By allowing yourself to be changed. By accepting that some part of you left with them, and that part of the work now isn't to pretend otherwise, but to slowly find what remains and who you are now in the wake of that absence. Not untouched. Not unchanged. Just someone learning to carry both love and loss together.
356. shared space
When a relationship ends, a space opens between two people. Not empty, but inhabited by something only they can recognize.
It isn’t longing or regret. It’s heavier than nostalgia, quieter than grief. A private place that belongs solely to them — the place where their shared memories continue to live, untouched by time or new lives.
The moments they created don’t dissolve. They settle here, in this invisible but very real space that exists between them. The same laughter in the same kitchen, the same late-night drives, the same whispered vulnerabilities. All preserved exactly as they were, viewable only from inside that space. Even if they never speak of it again, the same memories remain in both minds, held in parallel, like twin echoes of a single life.
There’s an ache in knowing this exclusivity will never be replicated. But there’s also a strange tenderness in knowing that what they built was real, finite, and theirs alone. The space honors that without demanding anything. No contact. No explanation. No reopening of what once was.
They move separately through the world now, yet carry traces of each other in subtle, unspoken ways: a song that skips the heart, a street that feels layered with old footsteps, a habit that once belonged to “us” and lingers in “me.” Small proofs that the version of themselves they became together still exists somewhere inside.
They are linked forever, not by unfinished business or hope, but by the simple fact that there was once a shared life, and only the two of them fully witnessed it. The space between them holds that witness. It doesn’t ask to be filled or explained. It just quietly endures. Sacred in its existence. Intimate in its permanence.
unfinished…
You did not love me quietly.
You told me who I was to you.
You said it without hesitation.
You looked at me as if the truth of it surprised you.
That kind of love doesn’t vanish on its own.
Nothing happened that would justify its erasure.
No betrayal.
No fracture.
Just time, familiarity, and two people slowly mirroring each other’s distance.
I don’t believe you stopped feeling.
I believe you stopped staying.
I believe silence became easier than contact.
I believe finding someone else made the question quieter,
but still unanswered.
There are moments I know I cross your mind.
Not dramatically.
Not enough to act.
Just enough to be inconvenient.
I don’t think what we were is gone.
I think it’s unfinished.
And I don’t know how to live as if something real was disproven
when it was never tested to its end.
So I stay where I am.
Not claiming hope.
Not pretending finality.
Holding the knowledge that some loves don’t end.
They’re carried forward,
leaving the future unfinished too.
353. how i show up
I’ve been in relationships for most of my life, or at least moving toward them. I enjoy companionship. I like sharing space, sharing days, sharing the small moments that make life feel ordinary. In practice though, I spend most of my time alone. When I’m not in a relationship, my life contracts. I don’t have a wide social circle. I don’t spread myself out across friendships, routines, or communities. I move through my days quietly, waiting. Solitude is familiar to me, but it has never felt like home.
When I do find someone I can center my life around, everything consolidates. That person becomes my world. Friend, lover, confidant, emotional anchor. I don’t feel lonely then, even if from the outside it might look like my life has narrowed. With my person, I feel safe. Life makes sense. I have direction. Without them, I feel untethered, not because I don’t know how to be alone in a literal sense, but because aloneness has never felt like a place where I fully belong, even though I spend so much of my time there.
When I am in a committed relationship, I don’t necessarily feel more like myself in someone’s presence, but I feel accepted. I feel allowed to exist without bracing. And if I’m honest, I don’t just wake up in that presence. I slowly disappear into it. Not intentionally, not in a way that feels dramatic at the time, but through a quiet drift. Feeling seen is the deepest form of relief I know. When someone reflects me back to myself, when my presence is noticed and responded to, the attachment deepens. Over time, I start placing more and more of myself there, until their attention becomes the place where I locate my sense of being real.
Over time, I’ve started to notice that my sense of self has never lived entirely inside me. That doesn’t mean I lack an inner world, personal values, or interests of my own. I do. Parts of me feel alive in isolation. But life itself feels hollow when it isn’t shared with someone. The parts of me that feel most coherent, most grounded, most oriented don’t stay fully accessible on their own. They tend to come online in the presence of another person.
When there is mutual attention, curiosity, and responsiveness, something in me settles into place. I don’t have to search for myself. I don’t have to perform. I feel alive without effort. Oriented. There’s a felt sense that I’m landing somewhere, that my presence is registering. I don’t just understand that I matter. I feel it in my body. And when that mirror disappears, it isn’t that everything goes quiet. It’s that something essential slips out of reach. The loss isn’t only of the person. It’s the loss of access to myself.
This way of being is often misunderstood. In a culture that treats self-sufficiency as maturity, it can look like dependence from the outside. From the inside, it feels less like neediness and more like regulation. My nervous system settles through emotional presence, choice, and reciprocity. When those are there, my body relaxes. When they’re gone, the absence doesn’t register as ordinary sadness. It feels like threat. Not dramatic threat, but something physical and disorganizing. The kind that makes it hard to care about things that once felt important. It isn’t that I suddenly stop valuing certain things. It’s that without grounding, they lose their magnetism. I feel unanchored, and without that footing, I don’t know how to stay engaged.
When access to myself can vanish that completely, the risk becomes impossible to ignore. Over time, I started trying to outrun the pain that came every time connection disappeared. If being chosen felt like safety, then the obvious solution was to become as un-leavable as possible. Self-improvement, discipline, emotional insight, generosity, competence, fitness. These weren’t aesthetic pursuits or ego projects. They were attempts to stabilize connection. If I could become undeniably great, maybe the ground wouldn’t drop out from under me again. If I could remove reasons someone might leave, perhaps connection would finally last.
And in some ways, this worked. I’ve become very good at attracting people. I know how to show up. I know how to listen, to care, to be present. Where things tend to fall apart is not at the beginning, but later, when safety settles in. I lose a part of myself inside the security of another, not because I stop caring or stop trying, but because I don’t actually know how to grow with someone once safety is established. I know how to become better for myself. I don’t know how to integrate that growth into a shared life. When I struggle, the other person often leaves rather than staying long enough for us to figure out a way through it together, and while I understand that it isn’t anyone’s responsibility to save me, it still hurts. Often, it’s devastating. My attachment bond runs deep. Deeper than anything I’ve experienced mirrored back. I would do almost anything to help the person I love through a challenging moment, and I keep hoping to find someone whose bond runs just as deep. The problem is, you don’t find that out until you’re already in it, no matter how well you show up at the start.
The strategy of becoming exceptional works until it collides with reality. No amount of excellence can override incompatibility, values, or another person’s limits. And when a relationship ends for those reasons, my system doesn’t experience it as a neutral mismatch. It experiences it as failure. Not because that interpretation is necessarily accurate, but because when safety is tied to being chosen, loss gets translated into inadequacy whether it belongs there or not.
What makes this especially destabilizing is that my identity itself is relational. When I’m with someone, I feel alive, capable, generous, and grounded. There is structure, orientation, an emotional gravity that pulls everything into alignment. When that bond disappears, the collapse isn’t gradual. It’s abrupt and total. The scaffolding goes all at once. Not just the relationship, but the role I was inhabiting, the feedback loop that quietly said: "I exist, I matter, I’m good." Endings don’t feel merely sad. They feel existential, because I’m not only grieving someone else. I’m grieving access to the version of myself that felt most alive, the version that laughed more easily, moved more freely, and felt more free to walk through the world.
This pattern shows up in how I relate to intimacy and meaning as well. My attraction to being deeply attuned to another person’s experience, to finding purpose in responsiveness, trust, and connectedness, isn’t incidental. It’s just how I organize significance. I feel most myself when someone feels seen and safe with me, when their experience is in dialogue with my presence. Not through control. Not through power. Through resonance and choice. When that loop is active, I know who I am.
The danger doesn’t seem to be this orientation itself. It’s how singular it’s been. When one person becomes the sole mirror, the sole place where that version of me can exist, there is no fading out when they leave. Everything just goes black.
This is why advice like “learn to be alone” or “learn to sit with yourself” has always felt trite. Being alone doesn’t feel neutral to me. It feels like falling out of coherence. I don’t calmly reflect. I don’t rest. I search. Compulsively. For connection, for stimulation, for anything that restores the feeling of being seen. Reading feels pointless. Working out feels empty. Eating feels irrelevant. These things don’t regulate attachment. They don’t mirror me back to myself. So my system rejects them, not out of laziness, but out of disorientation.
I don’t know exactly when or how this formed, but when I look back at my upbringing, some threads start to make sense. I don’t think I ever really learned how to be alone without interpreting it as abandonment. I don’t think I learned how to feel separate without feeling unsafe. My mother was anxious, emotionally consuming, often positioned as the victim, and I learned early how to adjust myself to keep her regulated. I wasn’t mirrored. I was needed. I wasn’t seen. I was tended to. I learned how to be good, how to be accommodating, how to earn calm by managing someone else’s emotional state. That kind of environment doesn’t teach you how to merge with another adult in a healthy way later. It teaches you how to perform for safety, not how to grow alongside someone who already loves you.
And there’s a paradox here that still confuses me. When I finally feel deeply loved and accepted, my nervous system settles. The frantic searching quiets. But instead of that safety becoming a foundation for shared growth, I often don’t know how to integrate my inner world with another person’s life. I keep growing independently. I read books. I eat well. I work on myself. But I don’t know how to weave that growth into the relationship. I think this is part of what happened in my past relationships. We didn’t grow together. We grew apart. Not because I didn’t love them or didn’t want to try, but because I didn’t know how to integrate myself with someone else once the chase for safety was over.
That’s led me to another uncomfortable truth. Because being chosen feels like safety, I’ve often been willing to look past incompatibility in the past simply to preserve connection. I’ve stayed longer than I should have. I’ve softened my edges. I’ve tolerated misalignment because the alternative felt like disappearance. Being chosen mattered more than being matched, and by the time I could see that clearly, I was already deeply attached.
I don’t think the universe is telling me that I’m broken. I think it’s showing me a pattern that can no longer be ignored. My sense of safety has lived inside singular relationships for a long time. When they disappear, I collapse, not because I’m incapable of being alone, but because too much of me has been living in one place. That makes sense when I look at where I came from, even if I don’t know exactly how to change it yet.
I don’t know what’s going to work. I don’t know how to build a life where connection still matters deeply, but isn’t the only thing holding me together. I don’t know how to remain myself when connection is interrupted rather than disappearing until it returns. What I do know is that I don’t want to become less relational. I don’t want to harden or detach or pretend I don’t need people. I want to understand how to stay present with myself so that connection can enrich my life instead of being the sole source of it.
I’m not broken because something is fundamentally wrong with me. I’m undone because my capacity for connection is large, and right now it doesn’t have anywhere sustainable to land. I don’t yet know how to distribute that capacity differently. I only know that pretending it doesn’t exist hasn’t worked, and neither has giving it entirely to one person at a time.
This isn’t a conclusion. It’s a starting point.
351. you’ll be all right
She said, “you’ll be all right.”
But what she really meant was that she needed to believe I would survive without her, so she could leave.
I nodded as though her reassurance hadn't punched a void straight through me.
What she couldn’t understand is that something inside me didn’t just break. It vanished. And what vanished wasn’t just her. It was the life that had already started forming around us.
The truth is, I don’t want to be all right. I want the place inside myself that finally stopped bracing. I want the version of me that existed when belonging felt possible.
I move through the world imitating someone unbroken. I answer emails. I stand in line. I nod at strangers. But inside, everything is screaming.
There is a constant pressure in my chest, like something is trying to claw its way out. I can’t breathe deeply anymore. My body doesn’t remember how. The ache is so constant it feels like a second heartbeat.
I don’t miss her the way you miss a person. I miss her the way you miss oxygen. Like something essential was removed and now every breath is shallow, conscious, and incomplete.
I don’t know where to put myself. Every place feels wrong. Every room feels temporary. I sit down and immediately want to stand back up because nothing feels like it belongs to me anymore.
I didn’t lose a person. I lost the gravity her love provided, and now everything in me drifts, panicked, reaching for something that no longer pulls back.
My body keeps asking the same question my mind can’t answer: where is home?
This pain doesn’t come in waves that crash and recede. It just an endless swell that keeps building. Each moment adds more weight, more pressure, with no release. Just more and more and more.
I hold it together until I don’t. There are moments when my body collapses into the grief without warning. In the car. In the shower. Standing still with nowhere to go. I don’t plan it. It just happens.
There’s a hollowness underneath all of it. Not loud. Not sharp. Just empty. Like something fundamental was removed and nothing was put in its place.
I gave everything I had. I didn’t hide. I didn’t blame. I didn’t demand. I spoke the truth with my whole soul. And the silence that followed didn’t just hurt. It erased.
I hate that the silence makes me doubt my own memory. Like the safest place I’ve ever known was never real enough to deserve a “goodbye.”
Silence is not neutral. Silence is a message your nervous system interprets as abandonment. It tells you that your pain has nowhere to land, nowhere it can be explained enough to rest.
I walk around carrying something unbearable, while everyone else keeps living like breathing is automatic. Like home is still a place you can return to.
I am not all right. I am not healing. I am just surviving minute to minute inside a body that no longer feels safe to inhabit.
This is not a breakup. This is the loss of the only place I ever truly felt safe.
And I don’t know how to build a life when the thing that made it finally feel livable is gone.
words i can’t say
I think about you everyday
I have ever since the first day I saw you
There was never anyone else
You were everything I wanted
I broke every part of myself trying to prove that to you
Nothing worked
You weren’t right for me
I learned the hard way
That a relationship is not a bandaid
I don’t blame you for anything,
but it hurts all the same
The future I had planned for us,
I have to erase
That hurts the most
I wanted to marry you
I wanted our kids to have your smile,
your laugh
I miss those parts of you the most
I miss what could have been.
A real family
A real love story
I wish it ended differently and,
I wish it never did
But in reality, you’re the most beautiful chaos
I’ve ever known
And there’s no place in my future
for things that don’t bring me peace
Just know, that after it all,
you’ll always have a piece of my heart
because I chose to give it to you
keep it,
and know that
I will always love you
I don’t know how not to
te amo.
328. empathy
We all claim to practice empathy, but simply saying “I feel your pain” isn’t empathetic, it’s just this generations equivalent of the old unhelpful bureaucrats who would say “Look, I sympathize with your situation, but there’s nothing I can do.” Unfortunately, we seem to be moving further away from the real practice of empathy as the former statement is so detached from action that there isn’t any use for the “but” as a bridge to the “there’s nothing I can do.” We all want our concerns to be heard, matched with feelings of equal concern, and ultimately alleviated. Yet, without real empathy there is no guarantee that any amount of listening to the problems of another will lead to a compassionate act. To paraphrase the essayist Leslie Jamison:
Empathy offers a dangerous sense of completion — thinking something has been done because something has been felt. Tempting us to feel virtuous because we’ve wandered into the ambiguous arena of trying to feel someone else’s pain. The peril of empathy isn’t that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good. which encourages us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than a catalyst in a larger process of understanding.
Empathy, as I understand it, is the ability to feel what another is going through. It’s more than an understanding, it’s putting yourself in the situation of another to have a shared experience. Instead of imagining how someone else is feeling, try imagining how it would feel if this were happening to you. In an instant, you can be transported to the forefront of the problem at hand, and come face-to-face with the main point of empathy; that really feeling someones pain feels painful. When that happens, the “there’s nothing I can do” has a greater likelihood of transforming into “how can I help.”
314. choosing the ones we do
We all want to lead enjoyable lives with people who set our soul on fire. Yet, much of the time we trade the attributes we’re most passionate about for the security or stability of something less fulfilling — be it financial or otherwise. And while that isn’t necessarily wrong, is it right to give up on something that can make you feel better than anything else, just to feel comfortable in a relationship that isn’t truly fulfilling you? I would say no, for the simple fact that stifling your needs will never allow you to recognize your true potential as an individual and impact the world in the most meaningful way. Finding someone who can light your soul on fire provides inspiration, whereas settling for security leaves you longing for the things that can make you whole. But, I don’t speak for everybody and ultimately, it is circumstances that dictate our narratives and the reasoning behind why we inevitably choose the relationships we do.
So, while it is admirable that certain people can slough off the need for security to follow their heart, it is a bit conceited to think that those who don’t are any less. At the end of the day, we all make decisions that are right for us in the moment. Security may be what some people need to develop into the person that chases their passion in the future; alternatively, aligning with someone who inspires you into action may be the best way to feel secure and achieve the life you’re after. We’re all different. Some of us will have our hearts broken, becoming casualties in the wake of another’s transformation, but if we’re lucky we’ll find the right person, at the right time, who chooses to walk the same path and wants to share in co-creating a narrative together.
310. soulmate
The modern idea of the soulmate is a yearning for connection and love that people in the ancient past would have sought through a connection with a higher power. It seems like a more appropriate path for this impulse to be guided along.
If we make a person a soulmate or a redeemer, what are we going to do when they let us down? What is a relationship, other than a reflection of ourselves? Do we ever really know a person or only the aspects of them you interact with. I’m sure we all know someone where we’ve been surprised to find they had a second life. But why? We’re always changing.
The idea of a soulmate is the materialization of an impulse that belongs in the realm of the sublime. It shouldn’t be epitomized. It shouldn’t be symbolized. It has to be lived. We can’t continually look for objects of fulfillment, whether they be relationships or possessions. Instead we need to look within ourselves, and understand we are beings in a constant state of flux. There is no self to label, no soulmate to anoint because we are constantly changing. There is no we, me, or you. We are continually evolving, remodeling, and growing with every moment and experience.
309. straying
Why do relationships go wrong? Likely, when we show up as someone other than ourselves with unrealistic expectations. When we hide away parts of ourselves or feel they’re unappreciated, we seek to have them actualized elsewhere, leading to infidelity as a way to prove that those parts of us are still alive.
The only way around this situation, and to cultivate a relationship worth having, is to show up as authentically and honestly as we can. Only then are we able to fully be ourselves and seen for who we truly are. It’s the only way to transcend the stagnancy that has become the status quo within a majority of relationships; where poor communication and worse sexual chemistry, ultimately push us or our partners to look elsewhere. It’s a search to fulfill something that is missing, but if we can transition away from the commonplace idea that we need to hide parts of ourselves from our partners, or settle for partners that don’t allow us to be seen for who we are, we’ll never find somebody who allows us to cross the threshold into the extraordinary territory where boundless magnetism and infinite potential exist.
If we’re able to find a person who fits us just right, and share in the life changing results of cataclysmic self-actualizing sex, things like infidelity do not happen. It cannot happen because there is no room for it. The only place infidelity can happen is within a relationship where the couple are out of sync, to the point where their relationship has devolved into lies or worse, deception, in an effort to hide parts of themselves or their needs. Of course, we all need a place to be our full selves, and if we can’t get it within our relationships, we stray.
306. change the things you say before you start to believe them
You are not your thoughts. Saying things like “I don’t deserved to be loved” or “my life sucks” doesn’t make it true, yet the more we say these negative things to ourselves, the harder it becomes to not believe them. We’ve all experienced heartbreak, loss, pain, and challenges along the way, but just because those events are in the past doesn’t mean we’re not still holding on to their repercussions in the form of negative self talk.
Those thoughts and feelings of negativity will persist until we learn what we need to change or redefine within ourselves. They serve as a beacon of where we need to place our attention so that the pain can be dealt with and healed. If, for example, you haven’t healed from a poor relationship with your parents, you may develop the mistaken belief that you don’t deserve love, and then continue to find partners who mirror your unresolved issues around love. If we don’t deliberately start changing the things we say to ourselves, we’re destined to repeat and recreate the pain over and over again.
299. it’s about compromise, right?
People in unhappy or unfulfilling relationships often say things like “relationships are about compromise, right?” More often than not, it seems like this sentiment stems from one person feeling pressured into doing what the other wants by pushing solutions that don’t seem fair. But real compromise feels different. It doesn’t mean mutual sacrifice; it means a balancing of desires. It’s a feeling that your needs are taken into account, and even if you don’t get everything you want, you, as well as your partner, both feel as though you got enough of what you needed.
Compromise doesn’t need to be a painful experience. It largely comes down to the emotional maturity of the people we’re involved with. The best outcomes are from those who are so attentive and connected that it’s enjoyable to work things out with them. They care about how you feel, and don’t want you to be dissatisfied. And because they have empathy, they won’t feel settled if you’re unhappy with the outcome. So don’t compromise your needs, cultivate your own emotional maturity, and find someone that is willing to balance your desires.
296. outsourcing our needs
Too often we enter relationships for the wrong reasons. We’re either looking to be seen for something we can’t see in ourselves or to fill a void that is too painful to deal with on our own. But outsourcing our needs will never allow us to heal.
We all need to take responsibility for ourselves and our emotions by accepting that it is solely our job to feel the things we want to feel, instead of looking for a partner to give it to us. This means we should endeavor to be the source of our own fulfillment, peace, safety, validation, and stability. And if we feel we are lacking in any of these areas, it means we need to get started doing the work to figure out why the voids are there, so that we don’t make the mistake of trying to find someone else to fill them by entering a relationship.
When we understand that it is no one’s responsibility to complete us, other than our own, we can do the work and then approach life from a place of wholeness, instead of lack. This gives new life, and promise to any relationship we enter into because we’re no longer relying on our romantic partners to make us happy or take away our pain.
287. mistaking attachment for love
We often mistake attachment for love. A lot of the time our sense of self is not rooted in what we see in the mirror or feel inside, instead it’s the illusion that another person can fill a void and make us whole. So in the event that they leave, or the relationship ends, the ensuing heartbreak feels like devastation because we not only lost someone we cared about, we lost a part of what allowed us to show up in the world. But the thing is, if we lose ourselves in the process of losing another, it’s likely not love that is causing the pain, but attachment to another.
The grasping and clinging we go through as the relationship starts to crumble is thought to be a representation of the depth of love we feel for another, when in reality, it’s just an attachment to the idea of them. And the more we reach out and try to hold on to that idea, the more afraid we become in losing this person, which inevitably causes more suffering in the end.
Ultimately, we need to understand where our feelings come from. Attachment will always feel exponentially worse because when a person leaves, they take a piece of us with them; whereas if it’s love, it’s still going to hurt, but that pain is going to come from the loss of something beautifully shared, not a loss of a sense of self.
286. settling for familiar
When it comes to love, there are people who are going to be better for you than others. Unfortunately, sometimes our right person may have already met, and established a relationship with, the wrong one. And you know it’s the wrong one because they stray far enough from their situation to stumble into you. And all that you offer one another, brings you closer, makes you feel alive, fulfilled, and inspired.
Yet, no matter how much love, chemistry, and connection that is shared between the both of you, there is never a guarantee you two will exist together, strictly for one another. It would mean, the one person in the wrong relationship would have to leave, and it’s never that easy. Largely because most of our decisions are based on familiarity. It’s easier to deal with any situation, even if it is less than ideal, when you know what to expect. And familiarity is so powerful that it can cause us to turn down the right person for the wrong one.
Some people realize what needs to be done and make the jump, other people choose to stay where they are because it’s familiar. In either situation, there are differing definitions of success and failure, so there’s no right or wrong answer to the question of what is the best course of action. But the thing is, if we’re settling for familiarity, ease, and comfort, simply out of the fear of having to struggle a little to find equilibrium in a better environment, how can we ever expect to have the things, feelings, relationships, connections, love, or successes we want?
282. better interactions
Most of the problems we encounter with one another arise from our lack of clear and concise communication. Here are a few tips to think about when we’re interacting with someone. Hopefully, with a greater awareness of our thoughts and the words we choose to express them, we can create better, more productive conversations.
Be willing to ask for help.
- Ask for help whenever you need to.
- Remind yourself that if you need something, most people will be happy to help if they can.
- Use clear, intimate communication to ask for what you want, explaining your feelings and the reasons behind your request.
- Trust that most people will listen if you ask them to.
Be yourself, whether people accept you or not.
- State your thoughts clearly and politely, without malice, and do not try to control how people receive it.
- Do not give more energy than you really have.
- Instead of trying to please, give other people a true indication of how you feel.
- Don't volunteer for something if you think you'll resent it later.
- If someone says something you find offensive, you don't need to let the statement go. Try to offer an alternative viewpoint, but don't base the success of the conversation on whether you can change the other person's mind.
Sustaining and appreciating emotional connections.
- Make a point of keeping in touch with people you care about, and returning their messages.
- Think of yourself as someone who can give and receive help from your community of friends.
- Even when people aren't saying the "right" thing, tune into whether they're trying to help. If their effort feels genuine, and makes you feel emotionally nurtured, express your gratitude.
- When someone irritates you, do not say the first thing that comes to mind, think about what you can say to improve the situation and create a mutual understanding. If necessary, wait until you cool off and then ask if the other person is willing to revisit the situation.
Have reasonable expectations.
- Keep in mind that being perfect isn't always necessary. Getting things done is often better than obsessing over getting everything perfect. Adjustments can usually be made after the fact.
- When you get tired, rest or do something different. Your level of physical energy and focus will alert you to when you're doing too much. Don't wait for an accident or produce poor quality work if your head isn't in it.
- When you make a mistake, just remember you're human. Even if you think you've anticipated everything, there will always be unexpected hurdles from time to time.
- Remember that everyone is responsible for their own feelings and for expressing their needs clearly. Beyond common courtesy, it isn't up to you to guess what others want.
Communicate clearly and actively seek preferred outcomes.
- Don't expect people to know what you need unless you tell them. Having someone care about you doesn't mean they automatically know what you're feeling.
- If the people closest to you upset you, use the feelings of pain to identify your underlying need. Then use clear, intimate communication to provide guidance on how they could give it to you.
- When your feelings are hurt, try to understand your reaction first. Did something trigger feelings from your past, or did the person really treat you insensitively? If someone was insensitive, ask them to hear you out.
- Be thoughtful to other people, and if they aren't thoughtful in return, ask them to be more considerate in the future, and then let it go.
- Ask for something as many times as it takes to get a clear answer.
- When you get tired of interacting, politely speak up, asking if there is anyway to continue at another time. Kindly explain that your capacity has been reached at the moment.
280. right person, wrong time
What happens if you find the right person at the wrong time? When I say the right person, I mean someone who you share a connection with that is unlike anything you’ve ever felt before. Exciting, but familiar. Comfortable, but never boring. Inspired, but safe in being who you are. There’s a perfect match in polarity. What you lack is uplifted by the other, and vice versa. Where physical attraction, spiritual passion, and sexual desire only grow deeper with each meeting. And no matter the space in between those shared times together, it’s like no time had passed at all. It’s everything that you read about in love stories and watch in romantic movies come true. Now condense all that down into one person, and that’s what I mean when I say the right person. Such a presence. And so hard to deny.
What if, you find someone who gives you all these things, and who says you do all the same for them, but that person is in a relationship with someone else? And it’s very unlikely that you’ll ever be together to realize your full potential because there are so many variables standing in your way. What is the right course of action for times like this? Am I supposed to walk away because it’s never going to happen or continue to fight for the best feeling I’ve ever had with another human being? It’s sad and tragic to think that the universe would deliver this beautiful person to me, who provides everything I need to be the person I aspire to become, yet I’ll never be able to truly exist with them. It’s the classic case of the “right person at the wrong time.”