I’m Not Me When I’m With You

I wish I could say that it was something you did to me. That somewhere between loving you and losing you, you slowly took pieces of me away. But I think the harder truth is, I handed them to you. One at a time.

I dimmed myself so you could shine brighter. Quieted myself when my feelings became inconvenient. Made myself smaller when I was afraid that being all of me might be too much.

And when you hurt me, I searched myself for the reason. What did I do? What could I have done differently? How could I have loved you better so you wouldn’t have done that to me?

I became fluent in excuses. Your wounds. Your past. Your childhood. Your fears. Your broken pieces.  I could explain every reason you hurt me before I could admit that I was hurting.

Maybe that’s because brokenness has always looked a little like love to me. Maybe somewhere deep inside is still a little girl trying to earn something she should never have had to earn.

So I find people with cracks in them that look familiar. I recognize their broken pieces because I see the same ones in my own reflection. And I try to fix them.

I love harder. Forgive faster. Understand deeper. Give another chance, and another, and another. My intentions are pure. But pure intentions don’t mean healthy ones.

Because while I was so busy tying to save the broken parts of you, I never had to look too closely at the broken parts of me. And maybe that is the part I never saw coming… I am part of the problem too.

Not because I deserved the things that hurt me.
Not because someone else’s choices were secretly mine. But because I kept abandoning myself and calling it love.

I thought loving someone meant meeting them wherever they were, even if getting there required leaving myself behind. So I changed. I became whoever I thought you needed me to be.

Because the truth is, I don’t know how to stay myself when I’m terrified myself won’t be enough to make you stay. And there it is. The thing I’ve spent years trying not to see. I keep searching for my worth in someone else’s decision to love me.

But no relationship can give me what I refuse to give myself. No person can fix what I keep avoiding. No amount of being chosen will teach me to choose myself. That part is mine.

I have to meet the woman I keep asking everyone else to love.  I have to sit with her when there is no one beside her. I have to learn her voice before I quiet it for someone else. Learn her boundaries before I move them. Learn what she likes, what she wants, what she believes, what she deserves.

I have to become someone I don’t need to escape from by disappearing into another person. Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life becoming different versions of myself depending on who loves me. I want to know who I am when no one is watching.

And someday, if I love again, I don’t want to become who you want me to be. I don’t want to shrink so there is room for us. I want to walk into love already whole enough to  recognize myself inside it.

Because maybe the person I have been trying to save all this time was never you. Maybe it was me.