I think one of the cruelest things adulthood has taught me about love is that two people can genuinely like each other, understand each other, desire each other, laugh until their stomachs hurt, talk for hours about everything and absolutely nothing, share values, have ridiculous chemistry, and still not have enough to make a relationship work. There was a time when I would’ve argued the fuck with that. If the connection was strong enough, if the compatibility was there, if two people really wanted each other, then surely everything else could be figured out. Distance could be navigated, schedules could be rearranged, differences could be negotiated, and life could be accommodated. I believed love was mostly about finding the person who made you feel something rare, then having enough courage not to fuck it up once you found them.

I’m starting to understand that there is another ingredient we don’t talk about nearly enough, probably because it isn’t particularly sexy: CAPACITY. I came across something recently about the difference between being wanted and being cared for, and it stopped me because I’ve spent so much of my romantic life learning that distinction the expensive way. Someone can be captivated by you without having the emotional maturity to care for you. Someone can crave your presence without knowing how to make room for it. Someone can talk to you for hours, desire you deeply, understand your mind, admire the woman you are, and genuinely believe you’re extraordinary while still being completely unequipped to build anything around those feelings.

That realization has been sitting heavily with me lately because I think we spend so much time asking whether someone likes us that we forget to ask whether their actual life has room for what liking us requires. I’ve been guilty of this too, Lord knows I have. I’ve mistaken intensity for intention, confused beautiful conversations with emotional availability, let chemistry convince me that logistics were merely details we would eventually figure out, and given possibility entirely too much authority over my heart. The romantic in me could take three extraordinary conversations, two vulnerable admissions, a little sexual tension, one perfectly timed FaceTime call, and start imagining the architecture of a relationship that neither one of us had actually begun building yet. I’m a writer, so of course I can see the story before it happens. The problem is that real relationships are not written in foreshadowing; they are written in behavior.

That has become especially important to me while reconsidering what long-distance love actually asks of people, because I don’t believe proximity is the magical ingredient people sometimes make it out to be. Living twenty minutes from someone doesn’t make them emotionally available, and sharing a ZIP code doesn’t create intention. Plenty of people sleep beside each other every night and haven’t truly met each other in years, while there are people separated by hundreds or thousands of miles who have learned how to make one another feel considered, included, prioritized, and loved. Distance doesn’t automatically kill relationships; passivity does.

When distance is involved, you can’t rely on casually ending up at the same place, sleeping over because it’s convenient, or squeezing somebody into whatever empty space appears in your week. Distance requires people to communicate deliberately, compare calendars, buy tickets, make plans, anticipate needs, protect time, and continually choose to turn affection into something tangible. It requires a willingness to take something that feels beautiful in conversation and eventually give it somewhere to live in real life. Maybe that is why distance frightens some people so much. It doesn’t necessarily ask for more love, but it does ask for more intention, and intention makes it much harder to hide behind ambiguity.

None of this means somebody should rearrange their entire life for a person they’ve barely begun dating. Quite the opposite. I actually think healthy dating requires us to stop giving strangers relationship-level access before they’ve earned it. Nobody should be uprooting their life, abandoning responsibilities, moving across the country, neglecting their children, compromising their career, or making dramatic sacrifices for a connection that is still introducing itself. There is, however, a tremendous amount of territory between change your entire life for me and let’s just keep talking indefinitely and see what happens.

Intention looks like curiosity about each other’s schedules and asking what is realistically possible. It means acknowledging obstacles without immediately treating them as endings and allowing two adults to look honestly at the lives they already have and ask whether there is enough room, desire, and flexibility to slowly begin creating something shared. Nobody has to know where they will live five years from now to know whether they want to see each other next month. Nobody has to promise forever to make a reservation, check a flight, compare a calendar, or say, I want to experience you outside of this phone, so let’s figure out what that could realistically look like. There is a difference between rushing a relationship and requiring a relationship to eventually move.

This is where I’ve had to confront something uncomfortable about myself too: I am incredibly capable of seeing possibility, sometimes too capable. I can look at two complicated lives and immediately begin seeing pathways between them. My brain naturally thinks, Okay, this doesn’t have to be impossible. We could do this. We could navigate that. We could make room here. We don’t need to solve the next five years today; we just need to decide whether we’re interested enough to take the next honest step. What I’m learning is that my ability to see a pathway doesn’t mean the other person has the capacity, willingness, or desire to walk it.

That distinction may save me years of future heartbreak because I used to think that if somebody could see what I saw, they would naturally want to build toward it too. I would explain the possibilities, soften the obstacles, reassure their fears, and essentially become the project manager of our potential. I wasn’t consciously trying to convince anyone to love me. I thought I was being optimistic, solution-oriented, and romantic, but looking back, sometimes I was doing emotional labor for relationships that hadn’t even been born yet. I was answering questions nobody had actually asked with their behavior and building bridges toward people who had never said they intended to cross them.

This version of me doesn’t want to do that anymore. I don’t want to convince someone that distance can work, audition my flexibility, present a PowerPoint explaining how two busy adults can maintain intimacy, or repeatedly reassure somebody that loving me won’t require them to abandon everything else they love. I don’t want to construct an imaginary future detailed enough for another person to feel comfortable visiting while I’m the only one laying bricks.

That doesn’t mean I expect anyone to read my mind. Communication still matters deeply to me, and I will always believe mature relationships require people to say what they want, what they need, what scares them, and what they’re willing to contribute. There is simply a difference between communicating your desires and coaching someone into desiring the same relationship you do. One is intimacy and the other is persuasion, and I don’t want love I had to persuade into existence.

That may be one of the hardest lessons for romantics like me because chemistry makes possibility feel soooooo fucking convincing. When you meet somebody whose mind stimulates yours, whose presence feels familiar, whose humor fits neatly beside yours, whose values appear compatible with your own, and whose energy makes something inside you lean closer, it is tempting to assume the connection itself is evidence that something should happen. Sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes the connection is real and the relationship still isn’t available.

We talk so much about the mythical right person, wrong time, but I wonder if what we’re sometimes describing is simply the right chemistry meeting insufficient capacity. The attraction may be real, the compatibility may be real, the tenderness may be real, and nobody has to be lying, manipulating, or secretly evil for the relationship to still be impossible in its current form. Sometimes two good people meet while one of them does not have enough room. Sometimes somebody has the emotional capacity but not the logistical capacity, while someone else has the logistical capacity but not the relational maturity. Sometimes people genuinely want partnership theoretically but have built lives that cannot presently accommodate one.

That last possibility is the one I think we struggle hardest to accept because we have been taught to treat desire as evidence. If somebody wants us badly enough, surely they will figure everything else out, and when they don’t, we start interrogating whether the desire was ever real. Maybe it was. Wanting someone and being capable of sustaining a relationship with them are not the same thing. I can want to run a marathon tomorrow and still not have trained my body to carry me twenty-six miles. Desire does not magically manufacture capacity, and romantic relationships are no different. Somebody can sincerely want partnership while lacking the communication habits, emotional regulation, time, resources, flexibility, courage, or relational skills required to maintain one.

That doesn’t make them a bad person; it may simply make them unavailable. I think this is where a lot of us get trapped, especially women who have been taught to love through understanding. We understand why he’s overwhelmed, the demands of his career, his responsibilities, his children, his previous heartbreak, his fears, why communication is difficult for him, why distance scares him, and why planning feels complicated. We can understand a person so thoroughly that our empathy eventually becomes a loophole through which every one of our needs disappears.

Maturity has taught me that I can understand someone’s limitations without volunteering to live beneath them. I can respect someone’s responsibilities without pretending mine don’t matter, acknowledge that someone is doing the best they currently know how to do while admitting that their best may not create the kind of relationship I want, and believe somebody likes me without turning their feelings into a promise they never actually made. There is something incredibly freeing about allowing people to be wonderful without immediately assigning them a permanent role in your life.

I can meet someone extraordinary and simply observe. I can enjoy the conversations, feel the chemistry, acknowledge the compatibility, and be curious about what might happen without emotionally moving into a future that hasn’t been constructed yet. I don’t have to kill the romantic in me to do that; I just have to stop letting her drive. She can sit in the passenger seat with her little playlist, romance novels, and delusional-ass daydreams while discernment keeps both hands on the wheel.

Maybe that’s what dating differently actually looks like for me: not becoming colder or assuming everybody will disappoint me, but also not demanding certainty before intimacy has had time to develop or blocking somebody the second uncertainty makes me uncomfortable. I’m learning to let reality remain reality long enough for somebody’s behavior to tell me what their words cannot. I can hope without projecting, desire without attaching, imagine without assuming, and care without overinvesting. Most importantly, I can let somebody reveal their capacity instead of constantly filling in the gaps with mine.

Chemistry matters, compatibility matters, attraction matters, timing matters, communication matters, and shared values absolutely matter. All of those things can create the conditions for something breathtaking, but none of them can substitute for the capacity required to actually sustain it. Eventually, somebody has to have room for you—not unlimited room, immediate access to their entire life, or reckless sacrifice disguised as devotion, but enough room to begin. Enough room to ask the practical questions, make a plan, and allow the relationship to leave the imagination and enter the calendar. There has to be enough room for your heart to eventually become part of their decision-making and for two separate lives to slowly begin learning the shape of an us.

I’m still romantic enough to believe love can cross cities, states, countries, schedules, careers, parenthood, seasons, and all kinds of inconvenient circumstances. I’ve seen enough life to know that human beings become remarkably creative when something truly matters to them. I’m simply no longer romantic enough to believe I can create that willingness for somebody else. Love can ask us to stretch, but it should not require one person to manufacture all the elasticity.

Maybe the real question was never, Do we have enough chemistry to make this work? Maybe it isn’t even, Could this become something beautiful? I’ve spent enough years answering those questions with my imagination, and Lord knows my imagination will make a masterpiece out of three conversations and a little mutual yearning if I let her.

If the answer is yes, we don’t have to know exactly how the story ends yet. We don’t need five-year plans, premature promises, or declarations about forever while we’re still learning each other’s favorite foods. We simply need two people who are willing to move toward what they keep saying they want, slowly, honestly, intentionally, and in reality. I don’t need the whole future yet. I just need to know I’m not the only one making room for it.

I’m crying to All I Have by Amerie.

Happy tears, which somehow makes this whole thing feel even more ridiculous and even more sacred. Before I made the decision, before I had all the language for what I was feeling, before I could explain why something that looked perfectly fine on paper suddenly felt so heavy in my hands, I kept humming the only piece of the song my memory could find: all I have. I couldn’t remember the verses. Couldn’t remember what came before or after it. I just kept hearing that little piece over and over again.

I believe the Holy Spirit governs my intuition, and one thing I’m learning is that discernment doesn’t always arrive with an explanation attached. Sometimes something rises in me before my conscious mind has caught up enough to understand it. Sometimes I get the feeling first and the language later. This time, the language came through a song I hadn’t thought deeply about in years.

Amerie’s debut album is All I Have. The album opens with Why Don’t We Fall in Love and closes its main song sequence with All I Have. I sat there looking at that and damn near laughed through my tears because what better way could there possibly be to conceptualize this tiny chapter of my life? I went from the possibility of why don’t we fall in love? to the acceptance of this is all I have. Somewhere between those two songs is the difference between imagining love and actually experiencing it.

And maybe that’s what I’m grieving today: something that was possible, but not practical. Something I liked. Something that could have been beautiful if what existed in imagination ever became something I could actually hold. There was no betrayal. No explosion. Nobody had to become the villain so I could justify leaving. There was simply a moment where I realized that I was being asked to continue investing in the possibility of something while receiving pieces of the thing itself.

That used to be enough for me because I am a creator. Give me three puzzle pieces and I can paint the other 997. Give me chemistry, beautiful words, a little attention and a glimpse of potential, and baby, I can build the whole damn house in my imagination. I can furnish it too. Put pictures on the walls. Pick the music. Write the vows. Then convince myself I’m standing inside something that technically hasn’t even been built yet.

That realization hurts a little because I really am a lover. I enjoy dreaming with somebody. I enjoy romance, intimacy, possibility, imagination and those delicious little conversations about what something could become. I don’t want maturity to turn me cynical or make me so afraid of disappointment that I stop letting myself dream. I just understand now that dreaming is supposed to accompany the building, not replace it. I can imagine tomorrow with somebody while experiencing something meaningful with them today.

That’s what becoming ready for love has actually been teaching me. I thought readiness would mostly be about learning how to receive love when it arrived. Instead, readiness has required me to protect my capacity for it. I cannot keep filling the space where a whole love belongs with fragments simply because the fragments are beautiful. I cannot accept pieces when I know I’m ready for the whole fruit.

And whole doesn’t mean perfect. It doesn’t mean somebody instinctively knows every desire I have without communication. It doesn’t mean immediate commitment, constant access, expensive gestures or abandoning real responsibilities to prove something to me. Whole means words, actions and capacity eventually meeting in the same place. Whole means I don’t have to continuously manufacture the missing pieces myself to keep believing something exists.

I supplied the imagination. I supplied the romance. I supplied the momentum. I supplied the benefit of the doubt. I supplied the meaning. Then I looked at everything I created and used it as evidence of what we had. Whew. That wasn’t always partnership. Sometimes that was me being such a damn good lover that I could make an incomplete experience feel complete.

The beautiful part of realizing that isn’t shame. It’s actually the opposite. If I could create that much beauty while carrying so much of it myself, imagine what happens when somebody comes along who can actually function with me. I don’t need another me. God already made enough Bryah for one relationship. I need somebody whose way of loving complements mine, somebody bringing his own ingredients to the table so neither one of us is standing there pretending one person’s basket is a feast for two. That’s why these tears feel different.

Old patterns don’t always end with some dramatic breakthrough where you’re standing in the mirror screaming, “I CHOOSE ME!” Sometimes freedom looks like sitting there with tears running down your face thinking, damn, I really like him, and still leaving. Not because you’re angry. Not because he’s terrible. Not because you need to prove how strong you are. You leave because liking somebody is no longer enough evidence that you should continue making room for them.

There is something incredibly peaceful about being able to say, “This person may be wonderful, and this still may not be enough for me.” Those truths can coexist. Somebody’s intentions can be sincere while their capacity, approach or offering doesn’t fit what I need. I don’t have to prosecute them to justify my decision. I don’t need a guilty verdict before I’m allowed to go home.

I don’t have to keep something going until it becomes painful enough to make the decision obvious. I don’t have to wait for disrespect, betrayal, abandonment or devastation before I’m permitted to acknowledge that something isn’t nourishing me. Uncertainty can become information. Incompatibility can simply be incompatibility. Sometimes the clarity is that I’ve heard what somebody is offering, I believe them, and I know myself well enough to say that what they’re offering doesn’t deserve the amount of space it currently occupies in my life.

I think that’s also why I feel less afraid of letting go now. I know the love I’m looking for exists because some version of it already exists inside of me. God created me with this enormous capacity to love, romance, nurture, imagine, create and commit, and I simply cannot believe He made that language in me without there being somebody capable of speaking back to it. Maybe not identically. I don’t need a mirror. But fluently enough that I don’t spend the relationship translating love to myself.

Not waiting like my life is sitting in some lobby until a man finally calls my name. I have shit to do. I have a life to build, a daughter to raise, school to finish, art to make, bills to pay, friendships to nurture, a body to care for, God to know more intimately and an entire woman inside of me still unfolding. Love can find me while all of that is happening. I am not closing myself to it. I’m just finally understanding that being open to love and chasing love are two completely different postures.

I don’t need to manufacture it anymore. I don’t need to search every room, every app, every conversation and every interesting man for evidence that maybe this is finally it. Love is not something I have to hunt down because I am afraid there won’t be enough left for me. I can remain available without being preoccupied. I can desire partnership without turning every possibility into a project.

Maybe that’s why Why Don’t We Fall in Love still feels like me too. I haven’t stopped being the woman at the beginning of the album. I still believe in that question. Hell, maybe I believe in it more now because I’m no longer asking it from scarcity. I’m still romantic enough to believe somebody exists who will meet all this love and bring his own fullness with him. I’m still soft enough to get excited. Still hopeful enough to imagine. Still brave enough to try again when something real presents itself.

The difference is that I’m no longer willing to write the entire middle by myself just because I desperately want to reach the ending. If I ask why don’t we fall in love? and reality answers because this isn’t the love you’re supposed to build, I can honor that answer without turning it into a tragedy. There will be another beginning, another possibility, another love. Next time, I’ll bring what I have, he’ll bring what he has, and we’ll make the music together.

Last night though, I was sitting there crying to a twenty-four-year-old Amerie album, realizing the Holy Spirit gave me the ending before my heart was ready to understand the words. Somehow I traveled from Why Don’t We Fall in Love all the way to All I Have, and this time I didn’t mistake the ache of an ending for instructions to stay.

Keri had been somebody since he was nineteen. At least, that was how he remembered it.

At Howard, there had always been somebody calling his name from across the Yard. Somebody saving him a seat. Somebody asking where the party was after the party. He pledged young, wore his letters like they had been stitched directly into his skin, and learned quickly that being a handsome Black man with ambition, charm, and the right people knowing your name could carry you a very long way.

By twenty-seven, he had the job. By thirty-two, the loft apartment. By thirty-five, the passport full of stamps, the tailored suits, the airport lounge memberships, and enough women in enough cities that he had stopped believing loneliness applied to men like him.

There was always some version of I’m not looking for anything serious right now, delivered over expensive bourbon or underneath dim restaurant lighting. Women heard him. Some believed they could change his mind. Some didn’t care to. Either way, Keri had constructed a life where nobody could reasonably accuse him of breaking a promise he’d never made.

It worked beautifully. Until it didn’t.

By thirty-nine, the noise had begun to irritate him. The parties were too loud. The conversations repeated themselves. The women were still beautiful, but even beauty had started feeling strangely familiar. He could predict the trajectory of most evenings before the first drink arrived.

He had spent twenty years collecting experiences and somehow still felt like he was waiting for his life to start.

So he left.

Charlotte wasn’t an escape, he told everyone. It was practical. His company had opportunities there. His money stretched a lot further. He could buy something with a yard instead of paying an obscene amount of money for walls he didn’t own. His mother liked the idea of him being closer to family.

All perfectly reasonable explanations. Keri liked reasonable explanations. They kept people from asking questions he hadn’t figured out how to answer.

Then he came back north one weekend and met Simone in D.C. She was late. That was the first thing he noticed about her. Fourteen minutes, to be exact.

Keri had already checked his watch twice when she came rushing through the restaurant apologizing to the hostess, one gold earring apparently missing, curls slightly disturbed by the August humidity. She was laughing before she even reached the table.

“Don’t fuss at me,” she said, sliding into the chair across from him. “The Metro and I are in an abusive relationship.”

Keri stared at her.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“No, you made a face.”

“I didn’t make a face.”

“You absolutely made a face.”

He had.

She was beautiful, but that wasn’t what unsettled him. Keri knew beautiful women.

Simone was… alive.

There was a difference.

She had moved to D.C. from Louisiana less than a year earlier with too many books, not enough furniture, and a conviction that everything would somehow work itself out because, according to her, it always does. Keri found this philosophy horrifying.

She was a writer. Sometimes a singer. Occasionally a dancer when somebody she loved convinced her to perform. She kept notebooks everywhere and voice-noted herself ideas in grocery-store aisles. She cried when songs were too beautiful. She changed her mind when new information changed how she felt.

She believed intuition was information.

Keri believed information was information.

Their first argument happened over a calendar.

“You cannot just put ‘sometime Saturday’ on a calendar,” he told her.

“I just did.”

“What time?”

“Saturday.”

“Simone.”

“Keri.”

“What time Saturday?”

“I don’t know what version of myself I’m going to be Saturday morning.”

He stared at her. She stared back. Then she burst out laughing.

He didn’t.

Which made her laugh harder.

Everything about her violated some small internal policy he’d spent decades perfecting. She left cabinets open. She started stories in the middle. She would ask him a question and then interrupt his answer because something he said reminded her of another question. She believed a Sunday afternoon could be completely successful without accomplishing anything.

She once changed their dinner reservation because the sunset was beautiful and she wanted to sit beside the water until it disappeared.

“You know we’re going to lose the table.”

“Then we’ll eat somewhere else.”

“That’s not the point.”

She looked at him. “Then what is the point?”

Keri opened his mouth.

Nothing came out.

Simone smiled. “Exactly.”

He hated when she did that.

He loved when she did that.

That was the problem.

Keri understood pursuit. He understood attraction. He understood the subtle negotiations between two people pretending not to care more than they wanted the other person to know.

Simone didn’t know how to play any of those games.

If she missed him, she said it. If something hurt her, eventually she said that too. If she loved something about him, she offered the compliment without withholding half of it to maintain leverage. She was affectionate without bargaining, curious without interrogating, independent without performing indifference.

And Keri had absolutely no idea what to do with a woman who wasn’t trying to win.

So he did what men sometimes do when they’re handed something they don’t yet have the emotional vocabulary to hold.

Not spectacularly. There was no affair. No screaming match. No villainous betrayal she could recount to her girlfriends over brunch.

He did something quieter.

He tried to manage her.

He treated her feelings like problems requiring solutions. When she wanted reassurance, he offered logic. When she wanted presence, he offered a plan. When something scared him, he withdrew long enough to analyze it before responding. Whenever their relationship began feeling too real, Keri instinctively reached for the casualness that had protected him his entire adult life.

Simone noticed.

Of course she did. Creative people noticed things everybody else thought they’d successfully hidden.

One night she sat across from him on the floor of her apartment, surrounded by books she still hadn’t bought shelves for.

“I don’t think you know how to be loved,” she said.

Keri laughed. Not because it was funny. Because he’d been offended.

“I’ve been loved plenty.”

“I didn’t say nobody has loved you.” She looked directly at him. “I said I don’t think you know how to be loved.”

He didn’t speak.

She continued softly. “You know how to be desired. You know how to be admired. You know how to be needed. You know how to make yourself valuable enough that people don’t want to lose you.”

Then she said the thing he would remember long after she stopped answering his calls.

“But I don’t think you know how to stand still long enough for somebody to know you.”

He told himself she was being dramatic.

That was easier.

He drove back to Charlotte Sunday evening and returned to his routines. Monday morning, gym at six. Work by eight. Lunch meeting at twelve-thirty. Calls. Reports. Numbers. Systems.

Everything exactly where it belonged.

Except her.

There was no Simone calling at 2:17 because she’d just thought of something. No photograph of a strange cloud. No unfinished poem sent without context. No voice note beginning, Okay, don’t judge me, but hear me out.

His life became efficient again.

And for the first time, Keri understood how empty efficiency could feel.

Weeks passed. Then months.

He dated. Of course he dated.

There was a beautiful woman in South End who worked in finance. Another one his fraternity brother introduced him to at homecoming. They were intelligent. Accomplished. Interesting.

There was nothing wrong with any of them.

Because every time somebody asked him what he wanted to do that weekend, he remembered a woman who never knew what she wanted to do until Saturday became Saturday. Every perfectly scheduled dinner made him remember missing a reservation because Simone wanted to watch the sun disappear. Every quiet car ride reminded him that she would have filled the silence with a story that somehow began with Toni Morrison and ended with an argument about whether we could recognize our godliness without arrogance.

He had thought she brought chaos into his life.

It took losing her to understand she had brought life into his order.

Keri turned forty in Charlotte. His fraternity brothers flew in. There was dinner. Cigars. Bottles. Stories from college that had been told so many times everybody knew when to laugh.

At some point, someone raised a glass.

“Forty years of being that nigga.”

Everybody cheered.

Keri laughed.

But later that night, alone in the kitchen of the beautiful house he’d bought because it had been the sensible next step, he looked around at everything he’d built.

For most of his life, he’d measured success by acquisition. The job. The house. The experiences. The women. The respect.

But Simone had never seemed particularly impressed by what he possessed. She had been interested in who he was when nobody needed anything from him.

And suddenly Keri understood why that had terrified him.

He had spent his entire adult life becoming a man everybody wanted.

He had never stopped to ask whether he had become a man capable of staying.

He picked up his phone. Her name was still there.

He didn’t type I miss you. That wasn’t enough.

He didn’t type I’ve been thinking about you. Too easy.

He sat there for nearly twenty minutes, deleting every version that sounded like the man he’d been.

Finally, he wrote:

You were right.

Three dots appeared.

Then disappeared.

Appeared again.

His heart beat harder than it had during any interview, presentation, flight, pledge process, or first date he’d ever had.

Her response finally came.

That’s an awfully dangerous text to send a writer.

Keri laughed so loudly it startled him.

Then another message appeared.

Right about what?

He looked around his quiet kitchen.

For once, Keri didn’t need a strategy. He didn’t need to know what happened next. He didn’t need guarantees or logistics or a carefully constructed outcome.

He only needed to tell the truth.

I thought you were disrupting my life.

He paused.

Turns out you were introducing me to it.

And somewhere hundreds of miles north, Simone stared at her phone.

She smiled.

But she didn’t answer immediately.

Keri would have to learn patience too.

This is me trying my hand at fiction writing. 🤍

buy me a coffee!

That is probably the most embarrassing and honest place to begin this entry, because for a few hours I had completely convinced myself that I was done. Nothing happened. There was no disrespect, no disappearing act, no sudden change in behavior, no breadcrumb thrown at me after days of silence. I simply hadn’t heard from him in the way my brain has historically associated with romantic interest, and somewhere between noticing that and going about my day, my nervous system started writing a story my reality had not actually given it permission to write.

The funny part is that I am currently dating a man who communicates with me in almost exactly the way I said I wanted to be communicated with. He makes time to FaceTime me because he wants to see my face. When we talk, we talk. Our conversations have depth and intellectual intimacy; we wander into ideas, beliefs, experiences, and all the strange little corners of ourselves that make getting to know another human being interesting. There is substance there. What there isn’t, however, is an endless stream of texts throughout the day just to prove we’re still thinking about each other. We might text every day, we might talk every other day, but there is no compulsory “good morning beautiful, how did you sleep?” routine keeping the connection on life support.

I remember being exhausted by men who technically communicated with me every day while somehow never saying anything. Good morning. How’d you sleep? What you doing? You ate? How was your day? Goodnight. Repeat until one of us dies. I kept thinking, Is this intimacy? Are we actually getting to know each other, or are we taking attendance? I wanted depth. I wanted conversations that made me put my phone down afterward and think. I wanted someone who understood that communication should count, not somebody who could send forty messages and still leave me knowing absolutely nothing about him.

I have to laugh at myself a little, but I also understand where the reaction comes from. I have spent enough of my life in survival mode that consistency once needed to be extremely visible before I trusted it. My attachment patterns learned to search for reassurance, and intensity was easy to mistake for safety because intensity constantly announced itself. Daily texts announced themselves. Immediate responses announced themselves. Somebody wanting access to me from morning until night certainly announced itself. There was very little room for uncertainty, which meant there was also very little room for two people to remain separate human beings while discovering whether their lives actually belonged together.

The slow burn is different. It doesn’t constantly reassure me of its existence, which means I have to learn how to exist while it is happening.

Dating differently has forced me to confront how quickly I used to over-give in the beginning. I would offer emotional access, time, attention, vulnerability, priority, and pieces of my daily life before a man had actually earned that position. Then I would quietly expect the same level of access in return, not realizing we’d essentially skipped several floors of intimacy because chemistry convinced me we belonged in the penthouse. I called it connection. Sometimes it was. Other times, if I’m being truthful, it was two people becoming incredibly important to each other before either had gathered enough information to know whether that importance was deserved.

This man is teaching me something I didn’t know I needed to learn: you can be interested in somebody without immediately reorganizing your life around them.

I am becoming part of his priorities, but I am not a major part of his life yet. That sentence initially bruised my ego until I realized how healthy it actually is. Why should I be? I haven’t earned that position yet. He hasn’t earned that position in mine either. We are dating. We are learning. We are collecting information about each other’s character beyond attraction and conversation. Neither of us needs to perform premature devotion to prove that the interest is real.

There is something incredibly sobering about admitting that because I think I used to confuse access with affection.If someone liked me, I expected more of them immediately, then gave more of myself immediately to demonstrate that the feeling was mutual. Healthy pacing felt suspicious because my nervous system understood acceleration much better than progression. I knew the rush of being consumed. I knew what it felt like for somebody to suddenly become woven into every part of my day. What I’m learning now is the quieter intimacy of allowing someone to occupy exactly the amount of space they’ve earned while leaving room for that space to grow.

Some connections taught me autonomy. I learned that desire doesn’t require surrendering ownership of myself, and pleasure doesn’t obligate me to build a future with everyone capable of giving it to me. Another connection taught me discernment. I learned that someone can be a good person, the chemistry can be real, the memories can be beautiful, and I can still leave when the relationship being offered no longer meets the standard of care I require. I learned that ending something doesn’t always mean something terrible happened. Sometimes nothing terrible happened at all. Sometimes I simply know what I need, recognize that it isn’t there, and trust myself enough not to stay around hoping reality eventually changes its mind.

Walking away has become easier for me because I’ve learned that I can survive endings. Sitting still long enough to discover what something might become requires a completely different kind of courage. I cannot run simply because I am uncomfortable, but I also cannot abandon discernment in the name of proving that I’ve healed. The assignment isn’t to tolerate inconsistency. The assignment is learning the difference between inconsistency and a pace that simply doesn’t feed my old appetite for constant reassurance.

That distinction matters.

I don’t want to become the woman who labels every anxious reaction intuition simply because the feeling arrived loudly. Sometimes my intuition is speaking. Sometimes an old wound has grabbed the microphone. Healing has required me to stop treating every internal alarm as evidence of an external fire and instead ask myself a much less dramatic question: What actually happened?

A man I am dating did not communicate with me according to an invisible schedule I never told him existed. The same man has consistently made intentional time for me, has shown genuine curiosity about my mind, has made space for meaningful conversation, and has not promised me access he cannot maintain. My fear wanted to evaluate him according to what was missing in a single moment. My more grounded self had to evaluate the pattern.

So I didn’t block him.

I sat with myself instead.

That might sound ridiculously small to somebody else, but I know exactly how much growth lives inside that decision. I allowed discomfort to exist without immediately converting it into action. I didn’t punish him for a fear he didn’t create. I didn’t manufacture distance so I could feel powerful before someone else had the opportunity to disappoint me. Most importantly, I didn’t abandon myself either. I listened to the part of me that was scared without allowing her to drive.

I prayed for something healthier as though healthy would immediately feel peaceful, forgetting that unfamiliarity can feel dangerous even when nothing dangerous is happening. I asked God to change what I attracted without considering that I would also have to change what I recognized as attraction. I asked for substance, intentionality, patience, depth, discernment, and a relationship that grew instead of exploded into existence. Apparently, receiving those things also means surrendering some of the behaviors that once made me feel secure.

There is no guarantee that this particular man becomes anything more than what he is to me right now. That’s another thing I’m learning to make peace with. I don’t need to turn every promising connection into prophecy. Maybe he becomes somebody important. Maybe he becomes another lesson. Maybe we slowly discover something beautiful, or maybe we eventually discover that we aren’t compatible at all. Dating is supposed to give us enough time and space to find out.

I want to know what happens when I stop trying to get to the answer before I’ve lived the question. I want to experience attraction without immediately demanding certainty from it, intimacy without prematurely assigning ownership to it, and interest without making somebody responsible for regulating every insecurity that surfaces inside me. I still require effort. I still require consistency. I still require communication that makes me feel considered. None of that has changed. What is changing is my understanding of what those things can look like when they aren’t being performed at maximum volume.

Perhaps the slow burn isn’t asking me to accept less.

Maybe it’s teaching me to stop requiring everything all at once.

I spent so much of my life believing that love announced itself through urgency that I never considered how beautiful it might be to watch something become important gradually. There is an intimacy in earning access to each other instead of immediately handing over the keys. There is safety in allowing actions to accumulate before assigning meaning to them. There is something deeply romantic about two people continuing to choose another conversation, another FaceTime, another date, another layer, without either person demanding that the ending be revealed before the story has had a chance to become itself.

So this is where I am today: interested, slightly terrified, very aware of myself, and trying not to confuse the absence of anxiety-inducing intensity with the absence of affection.

I asked for a healthier love life, and maybe this is what healthy dating requires of me before love ever enters the room: the ability to remain present long enough to let someone reveal themselves slowly, while I do the same.

No rushing. No over-giving. No inventing futures. No abandoning myself.

Apparently, I’m learning the art of the slow burn.

And this time, I’m willing to let it take its time.

stop being the side chick in your own life.

buy me a coffee if you love the work

I spent years thinking I had commitment issues with other people, but lately I’ve been wondering if that was ever the real problem. I knew how badly I wanted someone to choose me, prioritize me, remain consistent with me, consider me when making decisions, and continue showing up once the excitement of having me wore off. I wanted a love that could survive the death of novelty, the kind that stayed after the butterflies settled and Tuesday became Tuesday again. Somehow, it took healing for me to recognize the uncomfortable irony of asking other people for a kind of devotion I hadn’t yet learned how to give myself.

Not because I didn’t love myself. I think that explanation is too simple. I loved myself in all the ways that were easy to recognize as love. I could hype myself up, reinvent myself, dream enormous dreams for myself, romanticize myself, buy myself something pretty, take myself somewhere beautiful, and imagine entire futures where I finally became the woman I knew I could be. What I struggled with was the kind of love that doesn’t photograph well. The repetitive kind. The boring kind. The love that says, I know you don’t feel like doing this today, but we said this mattered to us.

For most of my life, I was incredibly good at surviving myself and incredibly inconsistent at maintaining myself. There is a difference. Survival mode taught me how to respond to urgency, how to rebuild after everything fell apart, how to make something out of nothing, how to perform under pressure, and how to become whoever I needed to become when life demanded it. Chaos gave me something immediate to solve, survival gave me adrenaline, reinvention gave me dopamine, and starting over gave me the intoxicating feeling that maybe this time everything would finally be different.

Tuesday didn’t come with an epiphany. Tuesday didn’t need me to save anybody. There was no dramatic comeback story waiting at the end of Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday just needed me to wake up and do what I said I was going to do. It needed me to study, answer the email, move my body, tend to my home, manage my money, create the thing, eat something that nourished me, keep the appointment, finish what I started, and go to bed so I could wake up and do some version of it again tomorrow.

I used to think transformation would feel bigger. I thought becoming the woman I wanted to be would arrive with some enormous spiritual revelation, some cinematic turning point where the old me disappeared and the new me walked out in slow motion with better boundaries and a retirement plan. Instead, so much of healing has looked embarrassingly ordinary. It has been me discovering that the life I kept praying for was hiding inside a thousand small decisions I previously considered too insignificant to matter.

Maybe that’s why self-sabotage can be so difficult to recognize when you’ve spent years in survival mode. Sometimes self-sabotage doesn’t look like intentionally destroying your life. Sometimes it looks like repeatedly abandoning the ordinary practices that would eventually build the life you claim you want. You aren’t necessarily choosing failure; you’re choosing immediate relief, stimulation, comfort, attention, distraction, or familiarity over a future whose reward you cannot touch yet.

I did that constantly. I could become deeply committed to a new version of myself as long as she was still exciting. I loved beginnings. New plans, new cities, new people, new goals, new routines, new eras, new identities—I could fall madly in love with possibility. Once possibility became responsibility, though, something in me wanted another beginning. I didn’t understand that I was treating my own life the same way I sometimes treated relationships: obsessed with the potential, energized by the discovery, and confused when eventually love asked me to stay after there was nothing new left to uncover.

Commitment is not intensity. Commitment is not wanting something really badly. Commitment is not thinking about something constantly, announcing it publicly, crying while praying about it, or creating a beautiful plan for how you’re finally going to get it. Desire can be incredibly intense without ever becoming disciplined. I have desired plenty of things I was not behaving like a woman committed to receiving.

It is what remains when nobody is clapping, nothing feels urgent, the dopamine has worn off, and your feelings are no longer interested in cooperating with the promises you made. Commitment is remembering that yesterday’s version of you made a decision for tomorrow’s version of you and honoring her enough not to renegotiate every agreement simply because today-you is tired.

The wildest part is realizing how much commitment I demanded romantically while struggling to practice it personally. I wanted someone who wouldn’t disappear when the novelty of me wore off. I wanted someone whose affection could mature instead of evaporate, someone who understood that intimacy becomes deeper when two people remain curious about each other after familiarity arrives. I wanted to know that I could wake up ordinary one morning—not seductive, not impressive, not entertaining, not extraordinary—and still be worthy of being chosen.

Maybe I had never experienced the commitment I kept saying I wanted because I had never been fully committed to myself. Not in the truest sense of commitment I was longing for. I knew how to be passionate about myself. I knew how to rescue myself. I knew how to bet on myself when everything was on fire. What I had to learn was how to remain with myself when there was no fire to put out.

That has changed the way I understand relationships too. I’m starting to believe you cannot ask another person to become the primary relationship in a life you are barely participating in. Partnership should not require me to demote myself. Love should not arrive and suddenly receive the best hours of my day while my dreams survive on leftovers. I don’t want to disappear into somebody else’s life and call that devotion. I don’t want my education, purpose, health, creativity, finances, friendships, faith, home, and future waiting somewhere in the wings while romance gets center stage.

More importantly, I won’t ask someone I love to become one in theirs either. Real partnership, at least the kind I understand myself to be preparing for now, cannot be two people abandoning themselves to prove they’re committed to each other. I want two whole lives meeting intentionally. Two people who can love each other deeply without requiring the other person to betray the promises they made to themselves before they arrived.

Not the Instagram version of self-love where I call myself beautiful and take myself to dinner, although I enjoy her too. I mean the relationship where I have finally begun learning my own patterns, keeping my word, repairing after I disappoint myself, forgiving myself without excusing myself, and making decisions based on where we’re going instead of how I feel for the next fifteen minutes. I’m learning that self-trust is built exactly the way trust is built with another person: evidence.

Every time I choose the future I said I wanted when nobody would know if I didn’t becomes evidence. Then, every once in a while, something extraordinary happens. A door opens. A goal gets accomplished. Something I prayed about becomes normal enough to sit on my kitchen counter. I look around at pieces of a life that once existed exclusively in my imagination and wonder when everything got so beautiful.The answer is almost never that day.

It was the boring mornings, the quiet decisions, the unfinished work I returned to, the small amounts I saved, the hours I studied, the things I declined, the routines I restarted without turning one bad day into an identity crisis, and the countless moments when there was no immediate evidence that any of it was working. Those tiny acts of commitment were accumulating somewhere I couldn’t see until eventually they became a life big enough for me to notice.

I think that might be what healing has taught me most: loving yourself is beautiful, but learning to tolerate the ordinariness required to keep loving yourself will change your life.

Anybody can become infatuated with a new version of themselves for three weeks. Anybody can love the dream while it’s still a fantasy. Anybody can announce that this is their season, their year, their comeback, their transformation.

I want to become so committed to my own life that I no longer need a crisis to make me participate in it. I want to love my future enough to build her when building her feels painfully unremarkable. I want to stop treating my dreams like somebody I text when I’m lonely and start treating them like somebody I made vows to.

I kept waiting for somebody to choose me with a consistency that would finally make me feel safe, never realizing that the most life-changing commitment might begin when I wake up on another completely ordinary Tuesday, look at the life sitting in front of me, and choose it again.

One of the funniest questions men ask me after we’ve spent enough time together is, “How are you still single?” It almost always comes after they’ve gotten beyond the pictures and the first impression. They’ve watched me talk about my dreams. They’ve seen how seriously I take motherhood, how disciplined I am with my goals, how intentional I am with my healing, and how deeply I love. Somewhere along the way, confusion settles across their face. They start looking for the invisible flaw, convinced there must be some secret reason another man hasn’t already “locked me down.”

Hidden underneath that question is an assumption that my singleness is something that happened to me, as though I’m simply waiting around wondering why no one has chosen me yet. The possibility they rarely consider is that my singleness hasn’t been created by rejection nearly as often as it’s been created by discernment. Men have chosen me. Men have pursued me. Men have wanted to build something with me. My life isn’t evidence that no one recognized my value. It’s evidence that I finally recognized it myself.

A few days ago, I ended things with a man I genuinely could’ve imagined building a future with. He wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t dishonest. He wasn’t emotionally unavailable in some dramatic way that would’ve made the decision easy. He was a good man. We laughed together. We enjoyed each other’s company. I could’ve easily convinced myself to keep going just to see where things landed. The version of me from a few years ago absolutely would’ve done that.

The excitement of getting to know each other slowly settled into something more familiar, and somewhere in that transition he admitted that consistent communication simply wasn’t who he was. I believed him. There wasn’t an argument to win or a person to fix. There was simply a moment where two people became honest about the kind of relationship they were each capable of building.

Years ago, I would’ve negotiated with myself instead of accepting what was in front of me. I would’ve convinced myself that maybe I was asking for too much. I would’ve called inconsistency “needing space” and emotional distance “different communication styles.” I would’ve stayed because I was more attached to the possibility of what we could become than the reality of who we already were. Looking back, I wasn’t protecting the relationship. I was protecting my fear of letting it go.This time, I did something that felt surprisingly mature.

I ended it.

Not by disappearing. Not by slowly pulling away until neither of us acknowledged what was happening.Not by settling into a situationship while secretly hoping he’d eventually become the man I wanted him to be.

I simply told the truth.

Then I left.

One of the greatest gifts healing has given me is the ability to stop negotiating my own needs. I don’t need someone to betray me before I decide to protect myself. I don’t need to collect evidence for six more months hoping I’ll eventually feel justified enough to leave. I don’t need someone to become a terrible person before I admit they’re simply not my person. That’s what emotional maturity has started looking like in my life.

It isn’t finding someone perfect.It’s becoming honest enough to acknowledge when something good still isn’t good for me. I think we’ve accidentally convinced ourselves that every relationship has to end with a villain. Somebody has to cheat. Somebody has to lie. Somebody has to break somebody’s heart so the other person has permission to walk away.

Real life isn’t always that dramatic.Sometimes two genuinely good people simply want two different relationships.Sometimes one person’s capacity doesn’t match another person’s needs.

The truth is, I liked him.

That’s what made leaving meaningful. Walking away from someone who consistently disappoints you isn’t particularly difficult. Walking away from someone you genuinely enjoy because you know your long-term needs won’t be met requires a completely different level of self-respect. That kind of decision asks you to disappoint your loneliness before you disappoint yourself.

Somewhere over the last year, my standards finally caught up to my self-worth.For a long ass time, I knew I was valuable, but my dating decisions didn’t always reflect that knowledge. I could write essays about boundaries while privately negotiating my own. I could encourage my girlfriends to leave inconsistent men while quietly accepting inconsistency in my own life. Knowing your worth and making decisions that honor it are two completely different stages of healing.

The older I get, the less interested I become in being chosen and the more interested I become in choosing wisely.

Maybe that’s why the question, “How are you still single?” doesn’t feel like a compliment anymore. It quietly assumes that the greatest mystery in my life is why nobody has kept me. The real story is that I’ve finally learned how to leave. I’ve learned that chemistry isn’t enough. Potential isn’t enough. A beautiful beginning isn’t enough.Liking someone isn’t enough.

I’ve spent enough years believing love required me to endure confusion in the name of patience. These days, I believe love should become more peaceful as it grows, not more uncertain. The right relationship won’t ask me to slowly abandon myself just to keep another person comfortable. It will invite both of us to become more honest, more consistent, and more ourselves over time.

So whenever a man asks me why I’m still single, I smile a little differently now.

I’m single because I finally learned that being chosen was never the prize.

Choosing wisely was.

I think one of the biggest lies we’ve ever been sold about love is that it arrives at convenient times.

Somewhere along the way, we started believing that our greatest love story would unfold with perfect timing. We’d both be single, emotionally available, healed enough to recognize one another, financially stable enough to build a life together, and mature enough to never hurt another person in the process. Nobody would have to make impossible decisions. Nobody would have to leave. Nobody would have to grieve. Love would simply arrive, everyone would celebrate, and we’d spend the rest of our lives pretending that’s how life actually works.

I found myself thinking about that this weekend after seeing Tyler Lepley and Miracle Watts get married. Like everybody else, I wandered into the comments, and one woman’s observation stayed with me far longer than I expected. She said that almost every long-term couple she personally knew met while one or both people were already in relationships. Some of those stories involved betrayal. Others didn’t. Many simply involved someone realizing they had met a person who fundamentally changed what they believed their future could look like. They ended the relationship they were in, grieved what had been, and eventually built a life with the person they met afterward.

I sat with that thought for a while, not because I wanted it to be true, but because I started realizing how often I’d quietly witnessed the same thing. When I think about many of the couples I admire, their stories rarely began the way romantic comedies tell us they should. Someone was dating someone else. Someone was engaged. Someone stayed longer than they should have because leaving felt impossible. Then life introduced another human being who didn’t necessarily create the problems in the relationship but revealed them. Suddenly, what had once felt “good enough” no longer felt honest.

That observation isn’t an endorsement of cheating. It isn’t permission to emotionally invest in people who have already committed themselves elsewhere, and it certainly isn’t an argument that every new attraction deserves to be followed. It’s simply an acknowledgment that timing doesn’t always respect relationship status. Life has a way of introducing people before we’re ready, after we’ve given up, or while we’re still living inside decisions we haven’t yet found the courage to outgrow.

I think that’s where the conversation usually falls apart. We’ve become so focused on whether someone leaves that we rarely ask whether they should have stayed. There are people who mistake novelty for compatibility and destroy something healthy chasing excitement. Those stories exist. There are also people who remain in relationships that have quietly ended simply because they’re terrified of disappointing everyone around them. Those stories exist too. One lacks integrity. The other lacks honesty. Neither one is the kind of love I want to build my life on.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this from a much smaller, much more personal place.

I just recently ended something with a man I genuinely could’ve seen such a beautiful future with. He wasn’t a bad man. He was kind, thoughtful, emotionally aware in many ways, and I truly enjoyed getting to know him. There wasn’t a betrayal waiting at the end of our story. There wasn’t disrespect. There wasn’t some explosive ending that made it easy to walk away.

The beginning was beautiful. We were excited about each other. The conversations flowed naturally. We made time effortlessly. Curiosity carried us. Then life settled in, and so did the ordinary. He admitted that consistent communication wasn’t really who he was. The excitement of the beginning had started wearing off, and I realized something equally important about myself. Consistency isn’t a luxury for me. It’s the soil where love grows.

A few years ago, hell, even last year, I would’ve negotiated with my own needs just to keep someone I liked. I would’ve convinced myself that chemistry mattered more than compatibility. I would’ve accepted less communication while secretly hoping he’d become someone different over time. I would’ve stayed because the potential of what we could become would’ve felt more important than the reality of what we actually were.

Today, that kind of hope feels dishonest.

Not dishonest to him. Dishonest to me.

I’ve spent too much time writing about self-respect to abandon it the moment I meet someone I enjoy. Love cannot grow where truth is constantly being edited. Integrity asks something much harder of us. It asks us to allow people to evolve into exactly who they are instead of forcing them to perform who we’d like them to become. It also asks us to admit when the version of love someone is capable of giving simply isn’t the version of love we’re hoping to receive.

Maybe that’s why this conversation about timing has been sitting so heavily with me. Sometimes we imagine integrity as staying no matter what. Sometimes integrity looks like leaving before resentment teaches you how to lie. Sometimes the most loving thing you can do is release someone before either of you has to become someone you’re not just to keep the relationship alive.

I’ve started wondering whether some relationships exist not because they’re meant to become marriages, but because they’re meant to prepare someone for one. That’s a painful sentence to write because none of us wants to imagine ourselves as the chapter before someone else’s forever. We all want to believe we’re the destination. The truth is, many of us have probably been someone’s becoming.

I’ve also wondered what it would mean if the person I’m eventually meant to build a life with is loving someone else right now. Not maliciously nor dishonestly. Simply living the life he currently believes is his. Maybe he’s learning lessons I’ll never have to teach him. Maybe she’s helping him become the version of himself I’ll eventually meet. Maybe life is preparing both of us separately before it ever asks us to walk toward each other.

I don’t know. And neither do you.

What I do know is that I’ve stopped romanticizing love at any cost. I don’t want someone to choose me while lying to someone else. I also don’t want someone staying with another woman out of guilt when their heart has already left. I want the kind of love that arrives after honesty has done its difficult work. I want someone who has looked directly at his own life, accepted the consequences of telling the truth, and walked toward me with clean hands instead of unfinished business.

Maybe that’s why I don’t fear endings the way I used to.

Some love stories begin with two single people who meet at exactly the right time. Others begin after difficult conversations, painful goodbyes, and the courage to admit that love has changed shape. I don’t get to decide how someone else’s story unfolds, and neither do you.

What I do get to decide is this:

If love ever asks me to choose between comfort and honesty, I’ll choose honesty every single time.

I’ve learned that love can survive disappointment.

Love can survive distance.

Love can survive grief.

Maybe that’s the real lesson.

Not every relationship is meant to become a marriage.

Every relationship, however, is meant to teach us whether we have the courage to tell the truth before we ask someone else to build a future with us.

There are moments in life that feel much bigger than the moment itself. They pull old fears to the surface and force you to sit face to face with parts of yourself you thought you’d already healed.

Tonight is one of those nights.(And honestly, i cant even believe I have words for this. My heart hurts so bad right now my child says I physically look sick)

What started as disappointment over failing a practice test somehow unraveled into something much deeper. By the end of the conversation, I wasn’t thinking about school anymore. I was thinking about every mistake I’ve ever made, every choice I wish I could take back, every version of myself I’ve worked so hard to leave behind.

One moment you’re a woman who has been rebuilding her life with intention. The next, you’re convinced you’re nothing more than the worst decision you’ve ever made.

I realized how fragile my confidence still is. I thought I had become this woman who believed she was worthy of healthy love, but the second life became uncomfortable, that old voice came rushing back. The one that whispers, If he really sees you, he’ll leave. If he knows everything, he’ll change his mind. If you’re not perfect, you’ll become too much.

The hardest part wasn’t the uncertainty. It was feeling exposed.

I hated the thought that someone I genuinely care about might see me through the lens of my past instead of the woman I’m becoming. I hated how quickly I started deciding what I deserved before anyone else had the chance to. I caught myself believing that maybe I wasn’t the confident, beautiful woman he met. Maybe I was just pretending all along.

But maybe that’s the lie.

Maybe growth isn’t reaching a place where you’re never afraid. Maybe it’s recognizing when your shame is trying to tell your story for you and refusing to let it hold the pen.

So right now I am learning that vulnerability doesn’t always look graceful. Sometimes it looks like sobbing over the phone. Sometimes it looks like sitting with uncertainty instead of running from it. Sometimes it looks like allowing someone to see you while you’re still trying to figure yourself out.

I don’t know how this chapter ends yet.

I don’t know what tomorrow will bring or what conversations still need to happen between me & my person.

Maybe healing isn’t becoming someone who never falls apart.

Maybe it’s becoming someone who no longer believes she’s impossible to love when she does.

I realized something about myself recently that I almost wish I hadn’t because, once you see it, you can’t unsee it. For years, I thought I was making modern decisions about love. I thought I was approaching dating as a thirty-four-year-old woman living in New York, building businesses, writing books, creating a career from my own ideas, and slowly constructing a life that belonged entirely to me. Yet underneath all of those very modern choices was a remarkably old fear.

It wasn’t something I said out loud, and it wasn’t even something I consciously believed, but it quietly influenced how much emotional weight I gave to the men I dated. Looking back now, I can see that I wasn’t just dating men. I was dating inside an inheritance.

That realization forced me to ask myself a difficult question. How could I be living a life that my great-grandmother could barely imagine while still carrying emotional expectations that were written for women of her generation? I moved across the country by myself. I pivoted careers and enrolled back in college in my thirties. I built an audience that allows me to make money from my own voice. I wake up every morning with work that matters to me, dreams that belong to me, and a future that I am actively building with my own hands. On paper, I have more autonomy than the women in my family could have imagined. Emotionally, however, I was still measuring the success of my life against whether a man decided I was worthy of keeping.

The more I sat with that contradiction, the more I realized it wasn’t entirely my own. It was inherited. Women before me weren’t irrational for centering men. They were responding to the conditions of the world they lived in. Marriage wasn’t simply a declaration of love. It was often access to housing, financial stability, social legitimacy, physical protection, and economic survival. A woman’s future could be dramatically altered by whether she married, and just as dramatically limited if she didn’t.

I think that’s the part we’ve forgotten when we talk about modern dating. We often compare today’s relationships to those of our grandparents without acknowledging that the conditions surrounding those relationships were fundamentally different. My grandmother wasn’t asking whether a man expanded her life because society had already decided that much of her life would revolve around him. She wasn’t evaluating emotional intelligence in the way many women do today because emotional fulfillment wasn’t what marriage had primarily been designed to provide. The institution itself served a different purpose, and women adapted accordingly because they had to.

What fascinates me is that our circumstances have changed much faster than our psychology has. Women have gained access to education, careers, bank accounts, homeownership, and financial independence, but many of us still inherited emotional scripts that tell us our greatest achievement is being chosen.

We learned how to provide for ourselves without always learning how to emotionally decenter the institution that previous generations needed to survive. I don’t think enough people appreciate how enormous that transition really is. We are the first generations of women attempting to separate love from necessity, and that changes everything about the way we experience relationships.

I see that shift most clearly when I think about my own life in New York. Somewhere between writing essays before sunrise, spending long days in class, building my businesses, and becoming increasingly obsessed with the woman I’m growing into, something unexpected happened. Men quietly stopped becoming the center of my story. They didn’t become unimportant, and I certainly haven’t stopped believing in love. They simply stopped occupying the place where my purpose used to be waiting for them.

That’s probably why dating feels so different to me now than it did even two years ago. There was a version of me that believed every accomplishment, every milestone, every dream I achieved would eventually lead to the same question: Yes, but did somebody choose you? I don’t think I realized how deeply that belief lived inside me until I watched it slowly disappear. Somewhere between moving to Chicago and choosing myself over and over again, I stopped measuring my life by whether I was loved romantically and started measuring it by whether I loved the life I was creating. Those are two completely different metrics, and they produce two completely different women.

That realization also changed the questions I ask when I meet someone new. I used to wonder whether he liked me enough, whether he was pulling away, whether I should say less, reveal less, need less, or become easier to choose. Those questions don’t even occur to me anymore. The question I ask now is much quieter, but infinitely more important: Do I actually enjoy this man’s company? Do I feel more like myself around him or less? Does he make my already full life richer, or does he require me to make it smaller just to accommodate him?

I think that’s the conversation we’re actually having when people say modern dating is broken or that the dating pool is full of piss.

We’re no longer evaluating relationships from a place of necessity as often as previous generations had to. We’re evaluating them from a place of choice, and choice has a way of exposing things survival never had the luxury of examining.

One woman asks whether he’ll provide stability. The other asks whether he’ll protect her peace. One wonders whether she can build a life with him because she has to. The other wonders whether she should because she’s already built one without him. Neither woman is wrong. They’re simply responding to two entirely different worlds.

I think about my great-grandmother often. I think about the choices she never had, the sacrifices she probably never spoke about, and the dreams she tucked away because survival demanded something else from her. I also think about my mother and the women in my family who carried pieces of those same expectations, sometimes without realizing where they came from. Then I think about myself, sitting in my Brooklyn apartment with a laptop, writing an essay that earns me an income, preparing for another semester of college, dreaming about my nursing career, building businesses, raising my daughter, and creating a life that belongs entirely to me. That isn’t just my story. That’s history unfolding through ordinary women.

Love no longer feels like the thing that will finally begin my life. My life has already begun. It began the moment I stopped waiting for permission to become the woman I wanted to be. It began the moment I realized that partnership isn’t the reward for building a beautiful life; it’s an invitation to share one.

People often say women don’t need husbands anymore as though it’s an insult. I hear something entirely different. I hear the sound of women finally having the freedom to ask questions our grandmothers were rarely afforded the opportunity to ask. Questions like, Do I feel safe here? Do I feel seen? Do I laugh more than I cry? Does this relationship expand my world or shrink it? Is this love, or is this simply the fear of being alone?

Maybe that’s why love feels so different now. Women didn’t become harder to love. Our lives became harder to compete with. We’ve spent generations learning how to build lives that are intellectually stimulating, emotionally fulfilling, financially sustainable, spiritually grounded, and deeply connected to purpose. Partnership no longer competes against loneliness. It competes against peace.

Maybe the greatest gift feminism, education, economic independence, and generations of women’s labor gave us wasn’t the freedom to live without men. Maybe it was the freedom to choose them for reasons beyond survival. Maybe the truest expression of love has always been choice, and for the first time in history, millions of women are finally getting the chance to make one.

This past Juneteenth, the Obama Presidential Center opened on Chicago’s South Side, creating another milestone in the legacy of the first Black family to occupy the White House. As images of the opening circulated across social media, I found myself thinking less about the building itself and more about the moment that made it possible. Like many Black millennials, I remember exactly where I was when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. I remember the excitement. I remember the tears. I remember the sense that history was unfolding in real time.

At the time, I was seventeen years old and a freshman at Southern University. On paper, I looked like the kind of young Black person Barack Obama’s election was supposed to inspire. The reality was far more complicated. I had recently aged out of foster care and the Department of Juvenile Justice, carrying an exceptional intellect alongside devastating trauma. Southern University became one of the first places where my intellect was nurtured instead of my trauma being documented. While the country celebrated a new era of possibility, I was trying to figure out what freedom actually meant for someone like me. I was learning how to navigate adulthood, build an identity beyond survival, and imagine a future larger than the circumstances that had shaped me. The election gave me hope, but hope and stability are not the same thing. Hope and belonging are not the same thing. Hope and understanding are certainly not the same thing.

Like millions of Black Americans, I celebrated Barack Obama’s victory wholeheartedly. There was no cynicism in my excitement. There was no hesitation in my pride. I understood the significance of seeing a Black family enter a space that had historically represented power, prestige, and exclusion. For generations, Black Americans had been told what we could not become. Suddenly the nation was watching a Black man place his hand on a Bible and prepare to lead the country.

A few months later, spring semester began, and my relationship to that moment started to evolve. In my African American Studies and Civics courses, I found myself immersed in conversations about citizenship, Reconstruction, race, power, public policy, economic inequality, and the unfinished promises of American democracy. The more I studied, the more I realized there was a difference between representation and governance. There was a difference between electing a Black president and electing a president whose politics specifically centered Black Americans. There was a difference between celebrating history and understanding power.

One quote from Barack Obama has always stood out to me: “I am rooted in the African American community, but I’m not limited by it.” The older I’ve gotten, the more I understand the brilliance of that statement. It captures the very thing that made him such a compelling political figure. Barack Obama possessed an ability to speak across communities, identities, and ideologies in ways few American politicians ever have. His story was expansive enough to hold the aspirations of an entire nation.

Many years later, I can finally articulate what I was feeling back then. I never questioned whether Barack Obama was Black. I questioned whether his story was my story. I never had that question with Michelle.

That distinction is important, particularly in an era where every conversation about identity quickly turns into an argument about authenticity. My reflections have never been rooted in questioning Barack Obama’s Blackness. His identity is not up for debate. His experiences are not up for debate. His historical significance is not up for debate. The question I kept returning to was much more personal than political. It centered on recognition. It centered on familiarity. It centered on whether I could see my own life reflected in the people who had become symbols of possibility for an entire nation.

His life story positioned him to speak across boundaries in ways few politicians ever have. He seemed capable of carrying multiple narratives at once, which is part of what made him so compelling to the American public. He represented possibility on a national scale. His appeal extended beyond race, beyond region, and beyond the traditional boundaries that often define American politics. That ability made him historic. It also made him feel distant from my own lived experience.

Michelle Obama, on the other hand, never felt distant to me. She felt familiar. She felt like someone whose story was rooted in a cultural language I understood instinctively. Her journey reflected institutions, traditions, and experiences that felt recognizable.There was something about the way she spoke about family, community, responsibility, education, and Black womanhood that required no translation. I did not need an explanation to understand why she resonated with me. Recognition happened immediately.

One of Michelle Obama’s most famous observations was, “Success isn’t about how much money you make. It’s about the difference you make in people’s lives.” That perspective felt familiar to me in a way that many political speeches never could. It reflected a worldview I had encountered throughout my life in Black communities where success was measured not only by personal achievement but also by collective responsibility. Her language often felt grounded in community rather than performance. Her presence often felt rooted rather than symbolic.

As I got older, I realized that my connection to Michelle had very little to do with politics. It had everything to do with recognition. She reflected a version of Black American womanhood that felt deeply familiar to me. I could see pieces of my mother, my aunties, my professors, my church mothers, and even pieces of myself in the way she moved through the world. Her story felt connected to a lineage I understood. It felt connected to a cultural memory I shared.

Michelle once wrote, “For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion.” That quote has stayed with me for years because it captures something many Black women understand intimately.

Becoming is often messy, complicated, and unfinished. As someone who entered adulthood carrying both academic promise and profound trauma, I understood that language instinctively. My feelings about Barack Obama continued to evolve as my understanding of politics deepened. The more I learned about governance, the more I understood that he was never attempting to be the President of Black America. He was attempting to be the President of America. His political project required him to navigate competing interests, competing expectations, and competing visions of the country. That reality helps explain many of the choices he made while in office.

At some point, I finally found the language for the distinction I had been wrestling with since college.

That statement is often misunderstood before it is fully heard. It is not an attack on Barack Obama. It is not a rejection of his accomplishments. It is not a declaration that Michelle Obama is somehow “more Black.” The statement reflects trust, familiarity, and recognition. Michelle’s Blackness felt like something I immediately understood. Barack’s politics required analysis, interpretation, and evaluation. One felt personal. The other felt presidential.

Looking back now, I understand that the Obama presidency gave different people different things. Some people found hope. Some people found inspiration. Some people found representation. What I found was a lesson about the difference between being represented and being reflected.

Barack Obama represented possibility. His presidency expanded the imagination of an entire nation and challenged assumptions about who could occupy the highest office in the land. That contribution alone guarantees his place in history.

Michelle Obama reflected something equally important. She reflected continuity. She reflected culture. She reflected a version of Black American womanhood that felt familiar, recognizable, and deeply rooted. When I looked at Barack Obama, I saw history unfolding before my eyes. When I looked at Michelle Obama, I saw pieces of myself.

The opening of the Obama Presidential Center reminded me that monuments are built to preserve history. My reflections on the Obamas have reminded me that history and home are not always the same thing. Barack Obama gave America a symbol powerful enough to change the country’s understanding of itself. Michelle Obama gave many Black women something different. She gave us a mirror.

That may be why, when I think about the first Black family in the White House, I remember feeling proud when I looked at Barack Obama, yet I remember feeling seen when I looked at Michelle.

Every year when Juneteenth comes around, I find myself feeling something deeper than celebration.

I feel a kind of pride that doesn’t come from accomplishment. It comes from INHERITANCE. It settles into my chest every time I think about who my people are and what they survived. It’s the kind of pride that makes you sit a little straighter when somebody asks where you’re from because the older I get, the more I understand that where I’m from is not something I overcame. It’s something I carry.

Not accidentally. Not reluctantly. Not in spite of it.

I come from New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana. Orleans and Caddo Parish. The Mississippi and Red River. I come from church mothers and hot combs, front porches and family reunions, aunties who could tell a story better than most authors, and grandmothers who knew how to stretch a meal and still make sure everybody ate. I come from people who could turn struggle into music, grief into laughter, and survival into culture. The older I get, the more I realize that isn’t something to outgrow. It’s something to HONOR.

For a long time, people made being from the South feel like something you were supposed to leave behind. Especially if you came from a small city. Especially if you came from the country. Especially if you didn’t come from somewhere people considered important. I remember how often Southern Black people were portrayed as backwards, uneducated, or unsophisticated, as though the people who worked the hardest to survive somehow had the least wisdom to offer. What a lie that was.

The older I get, the more I understand that the very things people mocked are the things that made us RESILIENT. The accent. The faith. The storytelling. The food. The music. The community. The way we know how to make something beautiful out of almost nothing. The way we know how to keep going when every reason says quit. The way we know how to love each other through impossible circumstances.

When I think about Southern Black women, I think about something Fannie Lou Hamer said: “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Every Juneteenth, that quote lands a little differently. My freedom has never belonged solely to me. It belongs to the generations that came before me and the generations that will come after me. It belongs to every Black woman who carried more than she should have had to carry so her descendants could have choices she never did.

The people who fought for my freedom did not come from penthouses and boardrooms. They came from dirt roads, fields, small towns, kitchens, churches, and communities that history books rarely spend enough time talking about. They came from generations of Black Americans who built this country while simultaneously being denied full access to it.

What amazes me most is that they still found ways to DREAM. They still found ways to LOVE. They still found ways to believe in a future they might never live long enough to see.

I think about what it means that my freedom was purchased by people whose names I will never know. Somewhere in my bloodline, there was a Black woman who survived something unimaginable so that one day I could sit in Brooklyn writing these words. A woman who probably never imagined a life like mine. A woman who likely never got to prioritize healing, self-discovery, purpose, or joy because surviving required everything she had.

Because Juneteenth isn’t just a celebration of FREEDOM. It’s a reminder of responsibility. It reminds me that my life belongs to something bigger than me. Every dream I chase is possible because somebody before me endured. Every opportunity I have is connected to somebody else’s sacrifice. Every choice I get to make was once a choice somebody prayed their descendants would have.

That is never lost on me, especially as a dark-skinned Black woman, especially as a Southern Black woman, and especially as a Black American woman.

There was a time when people tried to make women who looked like me feel like those identities were limitations. There was a time when dark skin was treated as something to overcome instead of something to celebrate. There was a time when being Southern meant people assumed you were less than. There was a time when being distinctly Black American wasn’t treated as a culture worthy of pride.

I wear every one of those identities with pride because I understand something now that younger versions of myself didn’t fully understand. Black American culture is not a deficiency. It is an inheritance.

Our music changed the world. Our language changed the world. Our style changed the world. Our creativity changed the world. Our resilience changed the world. Through it all, Black women carried entire generations forward while somehow still creating beauty, joy, softness, humor, and community in the middle of hardship.

Alice Walker once wrote, “In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.” The older I get, the more that quote feels like a roadmap. Every year I understand my Southern Black womanhood a little better. Every year I discover another piece of myself that was planted long before I got here. Every year I recognize that what I thought I was creating from scratch was actually an inheritance waiting for me to claim it.

That’s why I’ve always loved the idea of the BAPS.

Not because she is perfect. Not because she is wealthy. Not because she is above anybody else. She is royalty because she knows who she comes from. She understands that royalty is not always inherited through crowns. Sometimes it’s inherited through survival. Sometimes it’s inherited through culture. Sometimes it’s inherited through knowing that your people made a way where there was no way.

When I think about freedom, I think about something Nina Simone once said: “I tell you what freedom is to me: no fear.” Maybe that’s why Juneteenth feels so personal. My ancestors fought for physical freedom. Every generation since has been fighting for emotional, spiritual, psychological, and economic freedom too. Every generation has been trying to get a little closer to living without FEAR.

That’s the kind of royalty I come from. The kind with calloused hands and beautiful smiles. The kind with recipes that never made it into books. The kind with stories passed down around kitchen tables. The kind with laughter loud enough to shake the walls. The kind that survived what should have broken them and still found reasons to CELEBRATE.

Today, I am not celebrating freedom as an abstract idea. I am celebrating the people who made mine possible. I am celebrating every Southern Black woman who carried generations forward. I am celebrating every Black American ancestor whose name history forgot but whose sacrifice lives inside me.

Most of all, I am celebrating the woman I’ve become because of them: a Southern Black woman, a dark-skinned Black woman, and a Black American woman who is free, deeply proud, and fully aware that everything I am rests on the shoulders of people who survived long enough for me to stand here and say it.

One of the most disappointing realizations I’ve had as a woman is that being a good woman doesn’t actually guarantee you anything.

Maybe not consciously, but somewhere deep down I believed there was a relationship between goodness and reward. I believed that if a woman was loyal enough, patient enough, forgiving enough, nurturing enough, self-sacrificing enough, eventually life would hand her the outcome she’d been promised. The husband would come. The commitment would come. The partnership would come. Love would recognize her sacrifice and repay her for it.

Because marriage isn’t automatically a prize and commitment isn’t automatically a blessing. Being chosen isn’t automatically a victory. Those things only have value when the person offering them has integrity. A husband who lies isn’t a reward. A boyfriend who cheats isn’t a reward. A marriage built on betrayal isn’t a reward. A ring doesn’t magically transform poor character into good character.Once I really sat with that, I realized how many women have spent their entire lives trying to become worthy of love without ever asking whether the people offering that love were worthy of trust.

As bell hooks wrote, “Love and abuse cannot coexist.” The older I get, the more I realize how revolutionary that statement actually is. So many women have been taught to view suffering as evidence of commitment, endurance as evidence of character, and self-sacrifice as evidence of love. We are praised for staying, praised for understanding, praised for forgiving, and praised for seeing potential where everyone else sees dysfunction. Then we wonder why so many women wake up one day feeling depleted by relationships they were told were supposed to fulfill them.

A few days ago, I came across a Facebook post arguing that men don’t celebrate honorable women getting hurt. According to the post, men don’t hate women, they hate hoes. I understood the argument. I just don’t believe it.

The same men condemning certain women publicly are often seeking access to them privately. The same men praising “good women” for their loyalty are cheating on them with the very women they claim to despise. The same men celebrating modesty are sliding into DMs. The same men preaching virtue are consuming the exact behavior they publicly condemn.

The good woman is expected to provide loyalty, emotional labor, respectability, commitment, domesticity, and marriage. The woman they label a hoe is expected to provide fantasy, novelty, desire, pleasure, and escape. What struck me most about Professor Odi’s response was his willingness to ask the question nobody seems interested in asking out loud: what exactly are good women receiving in return?

Because women are constantly validated for being good women. Men praise our patience, our loyalty, our sacrifice, our forgiveness, our character, our willingness to stay, our willingness to understand, and our willingness to endure. Validation, however, is not the same thing as value.

A man can call you wife material and still betray you. A man can tell you you’re different from other women and still fail to value you once he has access to you. A man can admire your character while simultaneously benefiting from your self-abandonment.Those things happen every single day.

Five years ago, I still believed being a good woman was something you did in exchange for an outcome. Today, I think being a good woman should be something you do for yourself. Not because you’re hoping somebody chooses you, not because you’re waiting for a ring, not because you’re chasing validation, and certainly not because you’re seeking male approval. Those motivations are all rooted in external reward, and I’ve learned that goodness tied to reward is just another form of negotiation.

The version of me that exists now understands that integrity has to be its own reward. Honesty has to be its own reward. Kindness has to be its own reward. Otherwise, the moment life doesn’t deliver the outcome you expected, resentment starts creeping in because somewhere along the way you convinced yourself that your goodness purchased a guarantee.

You should be good because integrity feels good in your own body. You should be honest because dishonesty violates your spirit. You should be kind because that’s who you want to be when you look in the mirror at the end of the day. Goodness detached from reward is character. Goodness attached to reward is negotiation.

Audre Lorde once wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” The older I get, the more I realize self-preservation includes protecting yourself from ideologies that teach women their worth is determined by whether a man chooses them. It includes questioning narratives that ask women to endlessly develop themselves while rarely demanding the same level of growth, accountability, emotional intelligence, and integrity from the men they are supposed to love.

What makes this conversation so personal for me is that I no longer feel ashamed of the parts of myself that younger versions of me were taught to fear. Somewhere along the way, I stopped viewing my sensuality as something that needed to be managed, hidden, or justified. I stopped feeling guilty for being a woman who enjoys desire, who enjoys attention, who enjoys flirting, who enjoys dating, and who enjoys exploring connections simply because she’s curious about another human being.

The truth is that I’ve grown to love my autonomy. I’ve grown to love my sovereignty. I’ve grown to love the freedom that comes from belonging to myself first. Dating feels completely different when you’re no longer auditioning for approval. It feels completely different when you’re not secretly hoping every interaction turns into a relationship or every relationship turns into a ring.

One of the biggest discoveries I encountered during my evolution into womanhood is that autonomy feels better than approval ever did. Sovereignty feels better than validation. Self-possession feels better than being pedestalized. There is something deeply liberating about no longer organizing your life around being perceived as a “good woman.” There is something deeply liberating about realizing your worth isn’t determined by your relationship status, your body count, your marital status, or whether some man somewhere deems you respectable.

Alice Walker once wrote, “No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.” I think the same thing can be said about any belief system that requires women to suppress parts of themselves in exchange for acceptance. Any ideology that asks women to shrink their humanity so they can be more easily rewarded was never designed for our freedom.

These days, I’m much more interested in freedom than respectability. I’m interested in the freedom to choose, the freedom to leave, the freedom to stay, the freedom to explore, the freedom to desire, the freedom to change my mind, and most importantly, the freedom to belong to myself.

Honestly, the truth I’ve arrived at after all these years of loving, dating, marrying, divorcing, healing, growing, and starting over is surprisingly simple.

The only real prize is keeping yourself.

For the first time in my life, I finally understand why that’s enough.

One thing nobody tells you about keeping promises to yourself is that eventually your desires start changing.The shift doesn’t happen overnight. It doesn’t arrive with fireworks, dramatic revelations, or some cinematic moment where everything suddenly clicks into place. The change is much quieter than that. One day you wake up and realize the things you used to crave don’t even taste the same anymore.

Not the woman who arrived.The woman who made the decision.

The woman sitting in Chicago, broke, scared, uncertain, carrying a dream much bigger than her circumstances while making promises to herself that nobody else could hear. Those promises have been following me ever since. Somewhere along the way, I stopped focusing on whether other people believed in them and started focusing on whether I was honoring them. That’s where everything changed.

Every promise I’ve kept has made me hungrier to keep the next one. Every goal I’ve completed has made me realize how much of my energy actually belongs to my future. Every act of discipline has created a deeper level of trust between me and myself. Every commitment I follow through on reminds me that I am capable of becoming the woman I said I wanted to be.

Most of us spend years trying to build it with other people while completely neglecting it within ourselves. Then one day you start showing up consistently for your own life and realize that self-trust might be one of the most intoxicating feelings in the world. Nothing compares to looking at yourself and knowing you’ll follow through. Nothing compares to becoming a woman who keeps her word to herself.

Maybe that’s why I keep thinking about something Audre Lorde wrote years ago: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.” The older I get, the more I understand she wasn’t talking about bubble baths and spa days. She was talking about the radical act of refusing to abandon yourself. She was talking about choosing your own well-being even when nobody else understands why. She was talking about the kind of self-preservation that requires discipline, boundaries, sacrifice, and sometimes walking away from things you desperately wanted to work.

Not just my taste in men.

My taste in everything.

My tolerance changed.

My attractions changed.

My standards changed.

The things that used to impress me don’t impress me anymore. Conversations that once felt stimulating now feel repetitive. Men I used to admire don’t even look the same to me. There are moments where I look back and genuinely cringe, not because they’re terrible people, not because I’m angry, and not because I think I’m better than anybody. I simply cannot believe I gave certain people access to me.

Maybe that’s what happens when self-love reaches a certain level. You start looking at old acts of grace through different eyes. You realize some of what you called patience was actually self-abandonment. Some of what you called understanding was overextension. Some of what you called potential was simply you projecting your own depth onto people who didn’t possess it. That realization is uncomfortable.It’s also incredibly freeing.

Once you stop projecting your capacity onto other people, you can finally see them for who they are instead of who they could become. You stop mistaking access for intimacy. You stop confusing chemistry with compatibility. You stop believing that every spark is meant to become a fire. And that’s probably why dating feels so different to me right now. It’s not really painful, nor is it disappointing….Just unnecessary.

For the first time in a very long time, I don’t feel deprived by the absence of romance. Life no longer feels like something that’s happening somewhere else while I sit around waiting for love to arrive. The truth is that my life feels too full right now. Not necessarily full of people but full of purpose.

A few years ago, I would have happily rerouted my creative energy into a man. My attention. My imagination. My sensuality. My softness. My curiosity. These days, all of that energy has somewhere else to go. It has books to write. Dreams to build. Goals to accomplish.

That’s what nobody tells you about purpose. Once it fully grabs hold of you, distractions stop looking romantic. They start looking expensive. Right now, my energy feels far too valuable to spend on people who couldn’t even recognize what they were being given. Maybe that sounds harsh. It doesn’t feel harsh to me. It feels honest.

There is a difference between sexual energy and sensual energy, and most people never learn it. There is a difference between access and intimacy, between attraction and alignment, between wanting someone and actually having the capacity to meet them where they are. I’ve spent enough years teaching those lessons.

Whoever is meant to be in partnership with me is on the other side of this season. That thought used to make me anxious. But now? Now it comforts me.

It means I don’t have to go looking. I don’t have to force. I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to chase. My only responsibility is staying faithful to what’s in front of me. My only responsibility is honoring the commitments I made before any of these men ever entered the picture.

Recently, I’ve also been carrying a quote from Zora Neale Hurston that feels especially relevant to this season of my life: “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” New York feels like an answer year.

The woman who moved here arrived carrying questions about love, purpose, worthiness, timing, and whether she was capable of building the life she dreamed about. The woman writing this now isn’t asking nearly as many questions.

She’s busy building the answers.

Most people are so busy looking for what’s next that they miss what’s happening now. Most people are so focused on finding love that they never fully experience themselves. This season keeps teaching me the same lesson over and over again: presence is its own reward.

Not the kind of presence that comes from discipline alone, but the kind that comes from finally enjoying your own life enough that you stop looking for an escape route.

For the first time in a long time, I don’t need romance to make my life feel meaningful. I don’t need attention to make me feel beautiful. I don’t need potential to make me feel hopeful.

And honestly?

That feels better than being in love ever did.

Nobody really talks about how lonely it feels to finally regulate your nervous system after spending most of your life surviving.

People romanticize healing all the time. Peace gets packaged as something soft and beautiful, like once you start choosing yourself everything around you magically aligns. Nobody tells you that sometimes healing looks like sitting alone in a quiet room realizing almost every relationship in your life was built around a version of you that was dysregulated, over-giving, emotionally available on command, constantly rescuing, constantly pouring, constantly abandoning herself just to maintain connection.The more regulated I became, the emptier my life started to feel.

Nothing about it was even dramatic all the time. Some people naturally faded away once I stopped operating from survival mode. Other people became uncomfortable once I stopped over-explaining, overextending, and over-accommodating. Some relationships only worked because I was emotionally accessible in unhealthy ways, because I was constantly available to absorb chaos, because I didn’t have strong enough boundaries to protect myself from people who benefited from my instability.Once I became calmer, quieter, slower, and harder to emotionally access, everything around me shifted.

The hardest realization to sit with has been understanding that some people genuinely preferred the survival version of me because she was easier to benefit from. She answered every call. She tolerated inconsistency because chaos felt familiar to her nervous system. She over-performed emotionally. She confused being needed with being loved. She gave until there was almost nothing left of herself and still convinced herself that was what intimacy looked like.

Now I pause before reacting. I regulate before responding for the most part. I leave situations that feel unsafe instead of trying to force myself to endure them just to keep connection alive. There’s a level of self-respect developing in me that refuses to abandon myself for the comfort of other people.Still, I’d be lying if I said this version of me isn’t lonely sometimes.

There’s grief in realizing how many relationships were built around your wounds instead of your wholeness. There’s grief in realizing some people only knew how to love you when you were constantly available for emotional labor, chaos, dysfunction, or survival.

I came across a quote on recently from that said:

That quote sat on my chest for days because it explained something I haven’t fully known how to articulate out loud.

I’m tired of always being “the strong one.” Tired of being emotionally intelligent enough to self-soothe through everything. Tired of constantly having to self-regulate, self-comfort, self-parent, self-heal, and self-hold through experiences that honestly were never meant to be carried alone in the first place.

People praise independence so aggressively now that sometimes we forget human beings are still wired for connection. Not codependency. Not self-abandonment. Not unhealthy attachment disguised as romance. Real connection. Safe connection. Reciprocal connection. The kind where you don’t always have to be the one holding yourself together through every hard moment.That’s the strange space I’m in right now.

I’m finally creating peace within myself. My nervous system no longer craves chaos the way it once did, and somehow that peace feels quieter than I imagined it would. Almost too quiet sometimes.

There are nights where I miss having somebody to reach for, not because I need saving, but because I genuinely miss softness. I miss presence. I miss companionship that doesn’t feel draining or performative. I miss the idea of being emotionally held without feeling like I have to earn it through overgiving first. But that longing feels different now though.

Healing doesn’t erase your desire for intimacy, love, partnership, or community. Healing simply changes the kind of love your nervous system is willing to accept. It changes what feels safe. It changes how long you’re willing to stay somewhere that requires self-abandonment just to maintain proximity to another person. And unfortunately, that level of self-awareness can make your world feel smaller before it finally starts feeling aligned.That’s exactly where I am right now.

No longer surviving, but not fully arrived yet either. No longer willing to betray myself for connection, but still grieving how lonely self-respect can feel while you’re waiting for healthier love, healthier friendships, healthier community, and healthier experiences to find you.

The loneliness is teaching me something. The silence is recalibrating me. My nervous system deserves peace after spending years addicted to unpredictability and emotional inconsistency because that was the only version of intimacy I understood for most of my life.

Yet in still, there are moments where I wish somebody was here to witness me through this transition instead of always being my own witness. There are moments where I wish somebody understood how hard I’ve fought to become softer without becoming self-destructive again. There are moments where I wish healing didn’t require so much solitude before the right people finally arrive. Though I lament over this period of isolation, I would choose this loneliness over survival mode every single time.

For the first time in my life, my peace is no longer built on pretending I’m okay inside spaces that are slowly destroying me. That alone feels like proof that something inside me is finally healing correctly.

Not becoming unbreakable.

Just finally becoming safe for yourself.

girl get ya spark back!

Tuesday was Cinco de Mayo, and for the first time in years of celebrating the holiday, I wasn’t sloppy drunk. No tequila shots lined up at the bar, no blurry late-night memories, no drunk texting somebody’s son because loneliness started sounding like longing after midnight. The entire day felt strangely quiet, almost sacred in a way I can’t fully explain, like my spirit had already made a decision before my mind could catch up to it.

Not out of anger. Not because some dramatic betrayal happened. Nobody got caught cheating, nobody said anything crazy, nobody pushed me over the edge in one singular moment. That’s what made it feel so different this time. The decision didn’t come from reaction. It came from exhaustion. Deep emotional exhaustion. The kind that builds slowly over time when you keep pouring pieces of yourself into temporary places and then having to gather yourself back up every single time it falls apart.

One by one, I started deleting numbers, old threads, old access points, men I used to talk to every day, men I convinced myself I had chemistry with, men I kept around because some part of me still believed in “what if.” Looking back now, most of them were distractions dressed up as possibilities, and I think my spirit finally got tired of pretending otherwise.

What people don’t talk about enough is how emotionally draining modern dating actually is when you love deeply. There’s something incredibly painful about getting comfortable with somebody, letting them know your body, your routines, your softness, your little private habits, the way you laugh when you’re genuinely happy, the way you shut down when you’re overwhelmed, only to eventually have to detach and start over again like none of it mattered. That process does something to your nervous system after a while.

Love itself started feeling terrifying to me recently, not because I stopped believing in love, but because it became harder and harder to tell the difference between real intimacy and performance. Everybody knows the language now. Everybody knows how to mirror vulnerability long enough to gain access to you. Everybody knows how to make something feel emotionally deep without actually possessing the capacity for depth themselves.

Something shifted in me on May 1st, which also happens to be my great-great grandmother Big Mama’s birthday. I can’t explain it any other way except by saying I felt her presence heavily that day. It felt like every woman before me who survived impossible things was standing behind me asking why I was still allowing distractions to pull me away from the life I’m supposed to be building.That question sat on my chest all week.

The truth is, I have shit to do. Real shit. Dreams to build. Purpose to fulfill. A version of myself waiting for me on the other side of discipline and focus. When I sat honestly with my life, I realized there isn’t a man currently in my orbit special enough, aligned enough, emotionally mature enough, or intentional enough to justify being centered over my calling.

The older I get, the more I understand what Toni Morrison meant when she said, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Some people are not terrible people. Some people are simply heavy. Heavy on your focus. Heavy on your nervous system. Heavy on your emotional energy. Heavy on your future because they require so much maintenance just to remain halfway present in your life.

At 34 years old, I’m finally reaching a level of independence I honestly wish I had experienced much earlier, and I think that’s why this season feels so emotional for me. Young women should never skip the stage of learning how to fully stand on their own. Learning how to pay your own bills, regulate your emotions, manage your own household, make your own decisions, and create stability for yourself without depending on a man for survival changes the entire trajectory of your life.

A woman who has never had to fully hold herself up financially, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually becomes vulnerable in ways people rarely speak honestly about. She becomes easier to trap, easier to manipulate, easier to convince herself to stay in unhealthy situations because leaving feels impossible once survival gets attached to another person.

So many women were taught how to be desirable before being taught how to be independent. Taught how to nurture before learning how to protect themselves. Taught how to be chosen before learning how to choose themselves.

I can admit now that part of my attachment to love and male validation was rooted in survival patterns I didn’t fully understand before. Once you realize that, everything changes. The desperation leaves. The fear leaves. The urge to cling to inconsistent people leaves. Love stops feeling like a lifeline and starts becoming a conscious choice instead.

bell hooks once wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” I believe that deeply, but I also think there are seasons where isolation becomes necessary before healthy communion is even possible. Some solitude is sacred. Some distance is protection. Some loneliness is preparation.

This next season already feels lonely if I’m being honest. Choosing yourself sounds beautiful until you actually have to sit in the silence that comes with it. People romanticize solitude online all the time, but real solitude forces you to confront yourself without distractions, without attention, without temporary comfort, without somebody texting you goodnight just so you don’t feel alone.

Ready to stop romanticizing potential. Ready to stop handing pieces of myself out to people who haven’t earned access to me. Ready to reroute all this energy back into my own life instead of constantly pouring it into half-developed connections that lead nowhere.

What makes me emotional about all of this is realizing I’m becoming the woman I wish my mother had taught me how to become. A woman who understands that stability should exist within herself first. A woman who knows that love should add to your life, not become the thing holding it together.

That’s the example I want my daughter to witness early. I want her to understand self-trust before self-sacrifice. I want her to understand what Maya Angelou meant when she said, “Never make someone a priority when all you are to them is an option.” I want her to know that love should never require abandoning herself just to keep somebody else comfortable.

So yeah, I blocked every man in my phone.

Not because I hate men.

Not because love isn’t real.

Not because I’m broken.

The decision came from finally understanding that every version of yourself requires a sacrifice from the previous one, and this next version of me is demanding my full attention.

If you truly believe you’re the prize, you don’t have to keep reminding yourself… your decisions will do it for you.

Aries season just passed, and I’m not even going to lie, that was one of the best ones I’ve had in a long time. Not because everything went perfectly, but because everything became clear. There was no room to romanticize, no room to sit in confusion and call it something else. What was in front of me was exactly what it was.

For the most part, I moved like I knew my worth. I kept a tight ship. I wasn’t overextending, I wasn’t entertaining confusion. I wasn’t chasing, proving, or trying to be understood by men who weren’t even trying to understand me. Detachment has been real for me lately, not in a cold way, but in a grounded way. A “this either aligns or it doesn’t” kind of way. When it didn’t, I walked away without needing closure, without needing the last word, without needing to be chosen to feel valuable.

Still… I’m not about to sit here and act like I didn’t let one slip through the cracks.

And this is where its about to get honest as fuck. It wasn’t some random situation. It was someone who felt familiar, someone who felt easy, someone who didn’t immediately trigger my guard. That’s usually how it happens. It doesn’t come in loud or obviously wrong. It comes in just comfortable enough for you to sit in it a little longer than you should.

And bitch, I did. I let his ass get close enough again for his ego to matter.

The difference now is that once it crossed into misalignment, once my feelings got touched in a way that wasn’t being met, once I felt that shift in my spirit where something didn’t sit right anymore, I shut it down. There was no dragging it out, no trying to make it make sense, no spinning the block to see if it would be different the second time.

It ended. That’s the part I’m proud of. The old version of me would’ve stayed. She would’ve tried to understand him. She would’ve softened the situation just to keep the connection.

When I say not enough women believe they’re the prize, it’s not coming from a place of judgment. It’s coming from recognition. I’ve been the woman who said she knew her worth while still entertaining inconsistency. I’ve been the one translating confusion into potential, telling myself “maybe he just needs time,” sitting there trying to decode a man who was already showing me exactly what he had the capacity for.

There’s no way you fully believe you’re the prize and still feel comfortable in situations where you have to earn love. There’s no way you believe you’re the prize and you’re out here competing for attention. There’s no way you believe you’re the prize and you’re begging for commitment from someone who has never shown you consistency.

Even the conversation around marriage had to get real for me. There were moments where I use to want it so badly that I didn’t stop to ask if the person in front of me was even capable of honoring what that requires. A vow is a promise, so believing in that kind of promise from someone who has never consistently shown you that their word means anything is not love, it’s ignoring reality.

This is where everything gets grounded. This is where self-worth stops being something you say and becomes something you practice consistently, even when it’s uncomfortable. This is where you stop entertaining what doesn’t align, even if it feels good in the moment. (That doing it for the plot shit? LET IT GO.) This is where you stop giving chances that don’t need to be given.

The conversation around being in a “feminine era” needs honesty too, because there’s a disconnect there. Talking about softness and receiving while still being afraid to reject someone or walk away from misalignment doesn’t match. Softness does not require tolerance for disrespect. Being open does not require overextension. Being feminine does not mean abandoning yourself just to be accepted.

That’s not femininity.

That’s fear.

That’s what it actually looks like to believe you’re the prize. Not perfection,Not never slipping. Just knowing exactly when something isn’t right for you and having the discipline to close the door the first time it shows you that.

Because now there’s no auditioning. There’s only deciding.

I’m not even going to dress this up. I broke my own boundary. And I could sit here and try to make it cute, try to make it sound more controlled than it was, but that wouldn’t be honest. I was drunk. Not a little tipsy, not playful, not “I still got it together.” I was drunk in the way where your body starts reaching for what it remembers before your mind can step in and stop it. And I reached for him.

It started soft. “I’m drunk… I need help.” Even writing that back, I can feel how vulnerable that was, how open I was in that moment. I didn’t come to him guarded or detached. I came to him the way I always have when I’m not protecting myself… wanting to feel safe, wanting to be held, wanting to land somewhere familiar. And that’s the part I have to be honest about. He was never safe for me, but he was familiar enough to make me forget the difference. Then it shifted.

“I need you.”

That was the truth of it. Not the Excedrin, not the bed, not the logistics. I needed him in a way that had nothing to do with the surface of what I was asking for. And his response was, “How does help look? What do you need from me?” I answered him. I told him plainly. “I need YOU.” And there was no follow-up. No real meeting of me in that moment. No shift into presence that actually matched what I was asking for. Just space where something should’ve been. Boy, that silence said everything. Not because he was wrong, not because he owed me something in that exact moment, but because it confirmed, in real time, something I’ve been trying to soften for a long time. He does not meet me where I need to be met. So I spiraled.

And I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. I said things that were sharp. I said things that were emotional. I said things that came from a place that has been holding more than I’ve allowed myself to admit. “I don’t even know why I have hope in you.” “We on disrespect from now on.” “You make time for who you make time for.” Then it got muchhhhh deeper.

Because it was never just about that night. It was about everything—the inconsistency, the half-presence, the way I kept showing up fully and being met halfway at best. And the truth I didn’t want to say out loud was that I went through something real, something heavy, something that changed me, and he wasn’t there. Not really. So yeah… I said it. Messy. Unfiltered. Raw in a way I probably wouldn’t have chosen if I were sober. But honest. Painfully honest.

This is what I’ve been sitting with since. I don’t regret that I reached for him. I understand why I did. I love hard. I love fully. I love in a way that freefalls, that doesn’t calculate, that doesn’t hold back once I feel something real. And when you love like that, sometimes the ending isn’t clean. Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it comes out with a little bit of vitriol because that’s what happens when feelings don’t get a proper place to land. So maybe that wasn’t me breaking a boundary. Maybe that was me exhausting a defense. If I could be totally honest, that “boundary” I thought I had wasn’t fully rooted yet. It was something I was trying to enforce before I had fully processed what I felt. But now?

Now everything is out. There’s nothing left in me that’s wondering, nothing left that needs to be said, nothing left that’s trying to hold onto a version of him that doesn’t exist. And that’s where the real boundary begins. This time, it’s not coming from emotion. It’s coming from clarity. My mind is clear. My heart is catching up. My body is catching up. And the part of me that used to feel pulled toward him has gone quiet.

He doesn’t feel familiar anymore.

Thats the biggest shift of all. Because once familiarity turns into irritation, into disinterest, into a quiet knowing that you don’t even want to revisit the feeling, there’s nothing left to go back to. He’s not a pull anymore. He’s a nuisance. And that might sound harsh, but it’s honest. Because I finally see it for what it is. Not potential, not confusion, not something that just needs more time. Just something that’s over.

So yeah, I broke my boundary. But I also found my truth. And I’ll take that version of myself—messy, emotional, honest—over the version of me that kept pretending I didn’t see it clearly. And now, there’s nothing left to negotiate.

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There is a version of me that thought love was something I had to earn through performance. A version of me that believed if I was soft enough, pretty enough, understanding enough, sexually open enough, emotionally intelligent enough, then eventually I would be chosen in the way I always desired. That version of me did not realize she was operating from a survival-based identity, not a grounded one. She did not realize that everything she was attracting was not random. It was reflective.

I came across this concept recently that said imagination creates reality, and that we are living in a world of frozen imagination. At first, it sounded like another one of those spiritual theories that feels good but doesn’t fully land. Then I sat with it longer. I thought about my patterns, my relationships, the type of men I entertain, the cycles I keep finding myself in, and I had to be honest with myself in a way that did not feel comfortable.

There is a part of the framework that explains how from childhood, especially between the ages of zero to seven, we are essentially “programmed.” The way we experience love, safety, neglect, chaos, responsibility, and survival becomes the foundation of our belief system. That belief system then shapes our subconscious, and research shows that the subconscious mind drives the majority of our behaviors, often without us even realizing it. It forms our expectations, our emotional reactions, our choices, and most importantly, what feels familiar.

I had to sit with the reality that I was parented by absence. I learned early how to self-soothe, how to figure things out on my own, how to love myself in the absence of consistent love from others. I became strong, independent, resourceful, and self-sustaining before I ever got the chance to just be soft, to be chosen, to be held without having to earn it. That became my identity. Not just something I experienced, but something I became.So when I look at my relationships, it makes sense.

I do not attract men who are incapable of seeing me. I attract men who align with the version of me that learned to survive without being fully chosen. Men who desire me, enjoy me, even admire me, but still leave space for me to carry myself emotionally. Men who can be present, but not anchored. Men who engage, but do not secure.

And for a long time, I interpreted that as them.

Now I am realizing it has also been me.

Not in a blaming way. In an awareness way.

There is another part of this framework that talks about your “field,” your internal world, your beliefs, your self-concept, your emotional baseline. The idea is that your external life, your 3D experience, is a reflection of what is already happening internally. Not in a magical, instant manifestation way, but in a psychological, behavioral, and emotional pattern way. What you believe, expect, tolerate, and normalize becomes what you experience repeatedly.

So when I say I want a man who chooses me, who leads, who is consistent, who creates safety, who allows me to soften and submit naturally, I have to ask myself a harder question.

Or am I still operating from the version of me who is used to adapting, accommodating, understanding, and emotionally carrying connections that are not fully meeting me?

That question will sit in your chest.

Because the truth is, I have been both.

There is a part of me that knows I deserve intentional love, grounded love, consistent love. A part of me that craves leadership, stability, and emotional security. A part of me that is tired of almosts, maybes, and potential. That part of me is clear.

There is also a part of me that still entertains misalignment longer than I should. A part of me that romanticizes potential. A part of me that confuses intensity with intention. A part of me that, when faced with inconsistency, leans in instead of stepping back.

And that part matters just as much.

This is where the concept of “frequency” actually makes sense, not as something mystical, but as something practical. Your “frequency” is your self-concept in action. It is your standards, your boundaries, your expectations, your emotional regulation, your choices, and your consistency with yourself. It is not what you say you want. It is what you consistently allow.

So when I look at my current season, the villa, the men, the emotions, the frustration, the desire, the confusion, I can see both sides clearly now. I can see the version of me that is still learning how to choose herself in real time. I can see the version of me that is outgrowing certain dynamics but has not fully detached from them yet.

And that does not make me weak. It makes me aware.

There is a page in what I read that says, “Life gives you a reflection of who you’re being.” That line did not feel empowering at first. It felt confronting. It made me realize that if I want a different experience in love, I cannot just desire it. I have to become aligned with it in a way that is consistent, not occasional.

That means choosing differently even when it feels uncomfortable. That means walking away sooner. That means not overextending emotionally. That means not translating a man’s potential into reality. That means allowing space for someone to either rise into alignment or remove themselves naturally. That also means giving myself grace.

I am not starting from zero. I am unlearning years of survival patterns, emotional conditioning, and identity building that happened before I even understood what I was experiencing. I became a mother before I fully became a woman to myself. I learned responsibility before I learned softness. I learned how to hold everything together before I learned how to be held.

So of course this process is layered.

So of course I am going to have moments where I still feel pulled toward what is familiar.

So of course it is not going to be an overnight shift. But it is a shift.

I am no longer asking, “Why do I keep attracting this?”

I am asking, “What part of me still feels at home here?”

And more importantly, “Is that still who I want to be?”

That is where the real work is. Not in chasing love, not in analyzing men, not in trying to decode behavior, but in refining identity. In deciding, intentionally, who I am moving forward and what I no longer align with.

There is a version of me that still wants to be chosen.

There is a version of me that is learning how to choose better.

Not magically.

But inevitably.

Something shifted in me recently, and it’s hard to explain because it wasn’t loud or dramatic. It just feels like I finally see myself clearly.

I am one hell of a woman.

Not in an arrogant way, just in a way that feels honest. When I think about how I show up, how I love, how I care, how I move with intention and presence… I know that’s not something everyone is used to, and it’s definitely not something everyone knows how to handle in real time.

And I think that’s what I’ve had to accept.

A lot of men don’t fully recognize what they’re experiencing while they’re experiencing it. Not because I’m unclear, but because I’m accessible. I’m present. I’m there. And that comfort makes it easy for them to take their time, to be inconsistent, to show up halfway while still feeling like they have full access.

It’s usually not until I remove myself that it clicks.

And that used to be where I’d go wrong, letting people circle back once they “got it,” reopening doors that already showed me why they needed to be closed in the first place. Calling it grace, calling it patience, but really it was me not fully choosing myself.

That’s the part that’s different now.

I don’t feel the need to spin the block anymore. There’s no curiosity about what it could be this time, no desire to revisit something that already showed me its limits. Not because I’m bitter, but because I’m clear.

I don’t need delayed recognition. I don’t need effort that shows up after I’ve pulled away. I need presence, consistency, and intention in real time.

And if it’s not that, I’m okay letting it be what it was. Because I finally love myself enough to not keep going back to what didn’t choose me the first time.

I don’t know why that’s been playing in my head lately, but it has, looping in the background of my thoughts like something I didn’t ask for but also don’t want to turn off. Maybe it’s the way Olivia Newton-John sings it, light and dreamy, almost like she’s remembering something that didn’t last but still meant something. “summer dreams… ripped at the seams… but oh, those summer nights…”—that part especially has been sitting with me.

Lately, I’ve found myself daydreaming, not in a way that feels forced or desperate, but in this soft, quiet, almost childlike way where something in me just knows that this summer is going to feel different. There’s this deep sense that I’m about to experience a kind of love that isn’t heavy or complicated, something that doesn’t require me to figure it out before I can enjoy it, something that just exists and feels good while it’s happening.

When I think about it, what stands out the most is how light it feels in my body, like the kind of connection where laughter comes naturally without effort, where conversations flow without feeling like work, and where being around someone doesn’t come with the constant need to perform, prove, or protect myself.

The truth is, the way I’ve experienced love in the past hasn’t looked like that. It’s often been layered with questions and expectations, filled with moments where I was overthinking or trying to read between lines that shouldn’t have been there in the first place, constantly trying to make something become instead of allowing it to simply be. That kind of pressure pulls you out of the present every time, because instead of feeling what’s happening, you’re trying to define it while you’re still inside of it.

What I feel right now doesn’t carry that same weight. It feels like something I can step into, the same way you step into a warm summer night with no real plans but somehow everything still feels right, where there’s no urgency to figure out where it’s going or how it’s going to end, because being in it already feels like enough.

There’s no real desire to make it last beyond what it’s meant to be, and no need to turn it into something bigger than what it naturally becomes. Attaching meaning to it before it even unfolds feels unnecessary now, because experiencing it fully, exactly as it is, feels like enough on its own.

Living a love ethic lifestyle is starting to make more sense to me in this season, and what I’m realizing is that it’s not nearly as complex as I once made it out to be. It’s rooted in simplicity—being present, allowing things to unfold without interference, and recognizing when something already feels peaceful instead of interrogating it until it becomes complicated. There’s a difference between experiencing love and trying to secure it, and

Love itself has always been simple, but we are the ones who complicate it by adding expectations, timelines, definitions, and outcomes that it was never meant to carry. There’s this constant urge to make love permanent so that it feels safe, but in trying to make it permanent, we end up missing the actual experience of it—the small moments, the quiet joy, the in-between parts that don’t look like much from the outside but feel like everything when you’re in them.

That’s probably why I keep thinking about how India Arie said it’s the simple things, because the older I get, the more I understand that truth in a real way.

sometimes it’s found in the way a moment lingers a little longer than expected, or how a conversation stays with you after it ends, or how being around someone feels easy in a way you don’t have to question.

There’s something about this version of love that feels playful too, like I can flirt without overthinking it or allow myself to be soft without questioning whether it’s safe to be, and just exist in the experience without trying to shape it into something more. It reminds me of being younger, not in an immature way, but in a way that feels free, back before everything needed a label or a definition in order to feel real.

There’s also an understanding, somewhere in the back of my mind, that it will probably end, and surprisingly, that thought doesn’t make me anxious. If anything, it makes it feel more honest, because there’s nothing to cling to or force into permanence, just something beautiful that existed exactly when it was supposed to.

Right now, I don’t know who he is, and I don’t know where I’ll meet him or what this will look like when it actually happens, but I can feel it. That feeling is enough for me this time, without needing to question it or get ahead of it or turn it into something it hasn’t even become yet.

Open to the feeling, open to the simplicity of it, and open to whatever this summer decides to bring into my life.

Maybe that’s what this is really about.

Letting it be a summer dream.

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