There’s a scene in Far from the Madding Crowd that I’ve watched more times than I’d admit. Bathsheba looks at Gabriel and lists to him numerous reasons they can’t be together, one being that he’s far too good and then when push comes to shove, she says:

“I am too independent for you. You will grow to despise me.”

And he says, “Never.”

That’s it. One word. He doesn’t argue with her. He doesn’t list the reasons she’s wrong. He doesn’t say no you’re not or I can handle it. He just says never. Like he’s already seen the independence and it didn’t register as a problem because he never experienced it as one.

I have watched this scene so many times because I have been Bathsheba in every room. I have looked at men and said some version of that line, out loud or with my body, and waited. I’m a lot. I work too much. I don’t lean easily. I have said it as a warning. I have said it as a wall. I have said it to save myself the time of watching someone fall in love with the ideal and then six months or a year in, start to resent the exact thing that attracted them. Because the woman who doesn’t need you is exciting until your presence starts to feel optional. And optional is not a feeling most people can sit with for long.

Gabriel doesn't wait for the fortress to come down. He doesn't even see a fortress. He sees a woman. Standing in a field. Telling him who she is. And he says: I know you.

And what gets me every time is that we hear absolutes all the time. I'll always love you. Forever. No matter what. People say them easily. Most people mean them when they say them. Very few people mean them a year later when the thing they're promising to love through is actually happening in front of them and it's not romantic. It's just hard.

Ma, I think I became a man for you.

I don’t regret it. And it wasn’t your fault. And I didn’t become one all at once. Not in any way either of us would have named. But somewhere between watching you calculate the bills alone and watching you carry the groceries alone and watching you study a foreign language alone for the sake of me because there was no one else to call and calling someone would have cost money we’d already counted twice, I made an executive decision in a way a child decides things, which is in the body, not the brain. I decided I would be the other person in the house.

I started carrying things. I was maybe nine. You’d come home and your hands would be full and I’d rush downstairs and grab every bag in one trip as if it was a competition before you could set them down. You’d laugh. You’d say I was strong. You didn’t know I was practicing. You didn’t know I was memorizing the weight so that one day, when it was heavier, I’d already know how to hold it.

I watched your shoulders. This is the thing no one talks about. Daughters of single mothers learn their mothers’ shoulders the way other children learn the alphabet. I knew when you were worried before you spoke because your shoulders would come up half an inch, closer to your ears, as if your body was trying to protect your neck from something that wasn’t physical. And I’d watch that and I’d think: I will make sure she doesn’t have to do that. I will make enough money. I will be strong enough. I will fill the space in this house that keeps making her shoulders rise.

I didn’t know I was building a man inside myself. I just knew someone had to.

Girls raised by single fathers, I think, learn something different. I’ve watched them with curiosity and with awe. They grow up soft in a way I couldn’t. They learned early how to sit in a man’s presence and let him handle the weight. They cooked for their fathers. They tidied for their fathers. They learned tenderness as the thing you offer the person who protects you. And when they grew up and met men, they knew what to do with them. They knew how to lean. How to receive.

I don’t know how to do that. I’m thirty-five and I don’t know how to let a man even call me a car.

Not because I’m trying to prove something or win some dick swinging contest. But because somewhere in my body, in the part that was built during those years of watching you do everything alone, there is a girl who believes that the moment she stops carrying is the moment everything falls. That the weight is hers. That needing help is the first step toward the thing she saw happen to her mother.

I grew up wanting to protect you at all costs. And then I grew up and kept being the person in every room who says I got it before anyone finishes offering. I kept dating men and quietly, unconsciously, competing with them. I don’t think it was for dominance. I actually cry very easily, I just don’t cry in front of people. I think somewhere along the way, I developed this weird narrative that if a man was better than me, I’d have nothing to offer and a woman with nothing to offer wasn’t loveable as is.

The girl raised by a single father learned to trust a man by watching one stay.

I learned to not need a man by watching one leave.

Both girls grew up with one pillar instead of two. Both girls are strong. Both girls are missing something. The father’s daughter is missing the muscle of independence. She might stay too long in a love that doesn’t serve her because leaving feels like abandoning the role she learned at home. The mother’s daughter is missing the ability to receive. She might leave too early or hold too tight or build walls she calls standards because staying soft feels like a liability she watched cost her mother everything.

I don’t think either is broken. I think we’re both working with half a blueprint and spending our adult lives trying to draft the other half from memory or from therapy or from the men who love us and can’t understand why we’re so good at one thing and so terrible at another.

My therapist asked me once what I was afraid of. I said: becoming my mother.

And then I sat with that sentence for a week because it sounded ungrateful and it wasn’t. I love my mother. I love her more than I love most things that have names. And she is generous and kind despite how life has treated her. I think that is the strongest signal of resilience and character.

So I became the man at the table instead.

And here I am. Good at carrying. Bad at leaning. Good at providing. Bad at receiving. Good at being the strong one. Bad at being the soft one. Not because the softness isn’t there. Because every time I try to access it, the nine-year-old who took the grocery bags from her mother’s hands says: what are you doing. Put that down. You know what happens when you let someone else hold the weight.

The work, the real work, the work that no amount of career success or financial independence or I-don’t-need-anyone energy can replace, is learning to put the bags down. To look a man in the face and say I’m terrified and I love you before he says it first. To stop seeing my mother’s shoulders every time I consider leaning on someone. To let the man pick me up in a car. To let him. Not because I can’t. That was never the question. But because the girl who always carries is also the girl who never gets to rest. And I would like to rest. I would like to rest with someone. I would like to place my head on someone’s chest and be vulnerable enough to talk about a future together without being afraid of being too much.

Ma, you did everything. You did it by yourself and you did it without complaining and you did it with shoulders that rose and fell a hundred times a day and you never once asked me to carry anything. I took it from you. That was my decision. My child’s decision made in a child’s body with a child’s logic that said: if I am strong enough she won’t have to be. But instead, it’s caused you more grief to watch me choose a life where I am alone. It causes you worry so much that you’ve suggested I just have a child on my own. (I’m not really sure how that works and I haven’t looked into it but that’s how deep our love is. You think that by me having a child, it would replicate what we had.)

And what we have, albeit imperfect, is the best card I dealt when born.

I’m learning. Slowly. Poorly. The way I learn most things that matter. But I’m learning to be the daughter and not the man. To relax my shoulders. To look at someone and say the excruciating corny thing before I’ve calculated whether it’s safe to. It’s never going to feel safe. I know that now. Leaning never feels safe to the girl who grew up watching her mother stand alone. But I’m starting to think that safe was never the point. The point was love. And love, the real kind, the kind my mother deserved and never got to keep, requires exactly the thing that scares me most.

The willingness to let someone see me need them.

My silence felt like distance. My depth felt like absence. My composure felt like indifference. It was none of those things. But he could not tell the difference.

I read somewhere that if you want to know if a girl grew up scared, watch what she does when a man raises his voice.

I don’t yell back. I go somewhere else. Not physically. I stay in the room. B…

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There’s a scene in a movie I can’t stop thinking about. A taxi driver tells his passenger that men like the appearance of being a married man more than they like being one. He says it offhand, the way taxi drivers say things that ruin you. Like he’s commenting on traffic.

I think about that line because I’ve watched it play out. I’ve sat across from men …

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A year ago I was a different animal. Not a different person. A different animal. I moved through rooms like something wounded moves. Carefully. Close to the walls. Checking the exits not because I wanted to leave but because the knowing was the only thing that made staying bearable. I smiled at the right times. I answered the texts. I showed up to the t…

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I learned this phrase from a boy who was cruel to me in college. Not consistently cruel. Cruel in the way people are cruel when they like you and don’t know what to do about it. He’d ignore me for weeks and then show up at my door when something broke. We orbited each other the way damaged things orbit. Not by …

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I turned thirty-five today. Not with a party. With a quiet morning and a cup of coffee and the realization that I have spent the last year learning how to do two things I thought I’d already mastered: telling the truth and letting people stay.

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My grandmother took me to the bank the way other grandmothers took children to the park.

I was seven, maybe eight. Small enough that the lobby chairs swallowed me. I’d sit with my legs dangling, watching her sign her name on a card the teller kept in a drawer, and then we’d follow someone down a hallway that smelled like cold air and carpet cleaner into …

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Someone will sit in your chair after you leave. They will learn the systems you built. They will memorize the shortcuts you discovered. They will answer the emails you used to answer and attend the meetings you used to attend and eventually the room will adjust to their presence the way a room adjusts to new furniture. The dimensions don’t change. The f…

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I called my best friend at 1 a.m. and told her I was a monster.

Not in the way people say it when they’re fishing for reassurance. In the way people say it when they’ve spent three hours replaying every version of themselves they’re ashamed of and the evidence feels airtight. I listed the case. I said: I hurt someone who loved me. I watched myself become…

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Ma, in our next lifetime, let me be your mother.

Let me be the one who holds you first. Before the nurses. Before the paperwork. Before anyone tells you what you’re worth or what you’re supposed to become. Let me be the arms that find you before you learn that arms don’t always come.

I want to give you the thing no one gave you. Not the food. Not the roof…

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You don’t have to soften it.

The truth, I mean. The feedback. The thing you’ve been rehearsing in your head for three days trying to find the version of it that won’t hurt me. You’ve been rearranging the words. Padding them. Wrapping the sharp thing in so many layers of kindness that by the time it reaches me, I can’t feel the edge anymore. And the edge …

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I don’t cry. That’s not a boast. It’s a fact about my operating system. I can sit through hard conversations without my voice changing. I can deliver bad news and receive it and fold it neatly and put it somewhere and move on to the next task. I have been told I’m strong so many times the word has lost its meaning. I am not strong. I am trained. But I c…

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People warned me against it— told me to set it down and let it go, because apologies sent into certain kinds of silence have a way of being rewritten by the person who receives them. I knew that going in and I told them my reasoning: an apology is not an apology if it comes with expectations. What someone does with your apology, how someone interprets y…

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I’m rarely on Instagram anymore except for my end-of-day doom scroll. Thank God my algorithm is gentle. It feeds me new music and, more than anything, it shows me love that still exists. Not the curated kind. Not th…

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I started peptides in 2022. I’ve posted about the importance of getting into regenerative therapy properly and why it’s vital to get a comprehensive blood exam first to see which peptides can be used as regenerative and anti-aging, and which ones actually help improve your blood markers.

The legal arc:

• In late 2023, the FDA moved roughly 19 widely-used p…

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In Buddhism, there is a belief that the people who hurt you most are the people you’ve known the longest.

Not in this life. Before it. In the lives that came before language, before memory, before you had this particular face and this particular name and this particular way of flinching when someone raises their voice. The theory is that souls travel in …

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I once paused in a moment that felt too raw to move through. My eyes stayed on the floor the way a child’s do when the world suddenly feels louder than expected…overwhelming not because it is cruel, but because it is real. I learned then that pride can be a kind of cage. It protects you until it doesn’t. And love, when it finally arrives with enough for…

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你沒有開口。沒有要求。You embody.

I read once that the most dangerous thing about working at a big company is that you start calibrating yourself against the people around you. You become good relative to the room. You optimize for the local leaderboard. And the problem with local leaderboards is that they feel like progress while slowly narrowing your definition …

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There are two people in every love story you’ll never write about. The one who sees you and the one who soothes you. And they are almost never the same person.

The comfortable one is easy to love. He fits into your routine the way a pillow fits into a case. He doesn’t challenge the shape of your day. He laughs when you need laughter. He doesn’t ask the q…

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