I learned to become unwell very quietly, not because I wanted to be mysterious and not because I thought no one would understand, but because I heard, once too often, how exhausting it can be to love someone who is struggling, and the sentence stayed with me long after the person who said it had probably forgotten.

Before that, someone I loved had once asked me to change when, from where I was standing, I had only been trying badly to communicate. I did not yet know how to say I am scared without sounding angry, or I need reassurance without feeling ashamed of needing it, so everything came out misshapen and too sharp around the edges. I remember thinking that if the truest version of my pain was already too difficult to receive, perhaps the kinder thing was to make it smaller before offering it at all.

After that, I began editing my pain before handing it to anyone. I would say I was tired when what I meant was that I could feel myself disappearing a little. I would say work was busy when really work had become the place I went so I would not have to sit still long enough to hear myself. I became very good at answering I’m okay quickly enough that no one had time to look too closely at my face.

There is a strange instinct in people who are already drowning to worry about getting everyone else wet.

So you stop reaching for the hand because you imagine the weight of your body pulling them under too and eventually even your needs begin to embarrass you. You give people the version of the story that requires the least from them and call it consideration.

I used to think love was supposed to disturb me. That the shaking hands meant something. That losing sleep meant I had found something worth staying awake for. That chemistry was the body recognizing its fate before the mind could catch up.

I am less impressed by fire now.

These days, I notice who remembers that I like my mornings quiet. Who leaves my pills by my bedside because I sometimes forget to take them but does not announce that they noticed. Who asks before making the reservation. Who sees me disappear into myself for an hour and does not follow me there with a flashlight demanding to know what happened.

I come back.

That is the part I wish people understood.

My silence is not a door closing. It is a room I go into to put everything back where it belongs. I need a little time with my own thoughts before I can hand them to somebody else without cutting either of us on the edges.

I used to love people who took that personally.

My quiet became proof that I was incapable of respect or integrity. My questions became criticism. Their care arrived already assembled and I was expected to be grateful for a life I had not helped choose.

So I learned to make myself easy to manage. Then resented being managed.

There are old versions of me still living like this. One of them sits very straight at the dinner table and says anything is fine when nothing is. Another one goes silent and waits to see whether love is clever enough to find her.

I am trying to retire them gently. I tell her now: use your words.

She rolls her eyes. We are working on it.

Because I no longer want a love that proves itself by correctly guessing every hidden thing inside me. I want the kind where I can say, I am overwhelmed. Give me an hour. I’ll come back to you, and no tragedy is invented in the meantime.

Maybe this sounds terribly unromantic.

But I have started to find competence beautiful.

A person arriving when they said they would. A problem becoming smaller because there are suddenly two minds looking at it. Someone who can carry their own life well enough that I do not have to hold mine and theirs at the same time. Someone whose care is deliberate and practical, who notices the thing I overlooked and quietly makes the day easier, but still asks before deciding what belongs to both of us.

Someone who does not confuse leadership with deciding for me, and nor I him.

Someone who can say, what do you think? and genuinely wait for the answer. Someone steady enough that I can step back to think without fearing their whole world will collapse because I needed a little space.

I still yearn for warmth. I still want the stupid laughter, the hand at the small of my back, the look across a crowded room that makes the rest of it briefly disappear. I’m also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking her to love her.

I just no longer want to spend the following morning deciphering what any of it meant. And I think I know how I would love him too.

I would notice the things he stopped noticing about himself.

The way he rubs the bridge of his nose when he is tired. The meal he forgets to eat because he is still working. The shirt he reaches for when he wants to feel like himself again. I would learn the rhythm of his responsibilities well enough to know when to help and when not to interfere.

I would not make his competence another place he has to perform.

If the whole world knows him as capable, I would want home to be the place where he is allowed to be uncertain. Where he can put the phone face down, leave something unfinished, admit that he does not know what to do next, and not become smaller in my eyes for it.

I would not need to be the center of his life to know I mattered inside it.

I would want to build beside him. To remember what he forgets. To ask for his opinion before deciding something that belongs to both of us. To make the ordinary parts of life feel cared for enough that neither of us has to carry the whole structure alone.

I think that is how I love when I am healthy. Not by orbiting someone but by standing next to them.

This is what getting older has changed in me. Whether I can read beside you without filling the silence. Whether I can be tired without becoming less lovable. Whether I can close a door for an hour and trust that when I open it, you will not have mistaken my solitude for abandonment.

I do not need someone to complete my life.
I have spent too long learning how to carry one.

I think I want someone who can place their life beside mine without either of us having to become smaller to make room.

Someone who gives me the safety to put my armor down.

Someone for whom I can become a place where armor is unnecessary too.

Maybe that is how I will know.

Not because my heart is racing.

Because neither of us is performing strength for the other.

We are simply strong enough to be soft there.

I have dated men whose families made me feel as though I had entered a room already mid-performance.

Nothing was explicitly required of me. That would have been easier. It was subtler than that. I learned to sit straighter. To speak carefully. To become a little less strange, a little less loud, a little less myself in all the ways that might make the ro…

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Sometimes I revisit my old Tumblr account to see how much I’ve changed.

I wrote this poem 11 years ago:

I loved you in that tiny space
when my eyes widened over the little things
I loved you through that winter cold
when you wouldn’t even hold my hand
I loved you when you were nothing
but you were everything to me
and I watched you work into the AM
to become w…

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I record the ordinary things.

Not birthdays, not sunsets, not the moments already dressed for memory. I mean the half-finished conversations in the kitchen, someone laughing before they can finish the sentence, the sound of a person saying my name from another room. A hand reaching across the table for soy sauce. A bad joke. The way somebody looks when t…

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The older I became, the less I asked people to stay. Sometime after my twenties, I made myself a promise: I would never watch myself beg again. It did not mean endings hurt less. It meant I learned to conceal the hurt behind composure. Perhaps I lost some of the wide, doe eyed faith I once brought to lovers. Perhaps I became so practiced at surviving lo…

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A year ago around this time, I wanted nothing from life except work. And I made it that way for years.

I filled my days until there was very little room left inside them. I answered emails late enough that the timestamp began to feel like evidence. I stayed up for long after the rest of the house had gone quiet, laptop light against my face, a glass of …

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Some love arrives so quietly that by the time you recognize it, you have already accused it of never coming.

We are taught to look for love in declarations. In flowers delivered to offices, photographs posted on birthdays, expensive adornments. We learn to measure devotion by how convincingly it can be witnessed and because public love is easier to ident…

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There is a strange assumption that history makes a woman dangerous. That if she once knew how he took his coffee, which song he played when he could not say what he meant, or how his face changed in the second before he laughed, she must still be waiting to reclaim something. But memory is not ownership. Familiarity is not a deed. A person does not rema…

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The younger version of me believed that becoming successful would finally make her feel safe. The woman I became knows that safety is partly material, but it is also the ability to sit still without inventing a new deficiency. It is closing the laptop while there is still work left. It is hearing my mother move around the kitchen and remembering that he…

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Social media has created a strange kind of social currency: mostly insignificant in the grand architecture of a life, yet consequential enough that we are all forced to be aware of how we appear inside it. For a long time, I found that deeply uncomfortable.

I had this strange association in my head that if a woman looked too polished or too attractive, p…

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I know there are evenings when you leave a room full of people who laughed at your jokes, listened when you spoke, and thanked you for everything you did, only to sit alone afterward and feel as though no one had actually been with you. The room knew your warmth. It knew your competence, your charm, the version of you that can carry a conversation and m…

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When I was seven or eight, I began thinking about my mother dying.

There was no diagnosis, funeral, or horror film that planted the thought. I avoided horror films. My imagination preferred witches who were good, girls who discovered doors inside ordinary walls, and mermaids who loved the shore but could never quite reach it. Perhaps fantasy made me more…

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Not respected, exactly. Liked.

I thought that if I were easy enough to work with, sufficiently warm, and never too sure of myself, respect and success would eventually follow.

So I made myself easy to have in a room. I listened past the point of usefulness. I turned objections into questions…

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Tomorrow is August 2nd.

You died on mom’s birthday. We joke about it now. That you chose to die on her birthday so that every year we’d celebrate mom on the 1st and visit you on the 2nd. Ironically it works out because every year I try to take mom somewhere nice for a few days and the last day is always reserved for you.

It’s been eight years.

I’ve written…

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When I was a teenager, my mother told me that rarely in life do you end up with the person you love the most. She said it casually. Not as a warning. More like weather. I filed it the way teenagers file their mothers’ sadness somewhere between that won’t happen to me and she’s just saying that because of dad.

I think about that sentence now the way I thi…

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Not the depth that sustains them.

Not the depth that builds marriages.

Not the depth that produces fifty years

and grandchildren

and a house with a garden.

The depth that breaks,

and it broke you, too.

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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 wor…

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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 …

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