Where did you learn that self-erasure was love? Who taught you that leaving yourself behind was the price of being cared for? Who convinced you that devotion meant shrinking your needs so everyone else could be fed?
You can listen to me read this essay below.
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Most of us didn’t learn self-abandonment all at once. We absorbed it slowly, the way sap seeps from a wounded tree—clear and sticky along the bark. When my daughters and I are out walking and we pass a tree that’s lost a limb, the sap sometimes gathers there. My middle daughter always stops and says, Look mama, the tree is crying.
And I think about that tree for a moment—the limb it lost, the sap gathering along the wound. The way the tree is still standing, still growing, even after something has been taken from it. And it makes me wonder how many of us learned to believe that losing pieces of ourselves was simply the cost of healing.
That maybe love required it.
That maybe belonging required it.
That’s how many of us learned to leave ourselves behind.
In homes where keeping the peace mattered more than telling the truth. In friendships where we became the listener, the fixer, the steady one. In relationships where we confused not letting go with staying loyal.
Little by little, we practiced disappearing.
Not all at once.
Just enough to keep things working. Just enough to keep everyone comfortable. And somewhere along the way, we started believing that this was what love requires to be steady and good. To be holy and sacred.
But—I’ve also learned that even when life gets sticky, and our old wounds are exposed: Giving up on ourselves isn’t an option if we truly want to heal. Not after everything it took to get here.
Not after feeling like we’ve had to lose limbs in the pursuit of belonging or becoming whole. Not after the years of learning how to stand back up when things collapsed around you. Not after the seasons of questioning yourself and still finding the strength to keep moving forward.
The restraint it required not to burn every bridge when you were hurting.
The grace it took to keep loving people who did not always know how to love you back.
The strength it takes to keep your heart open when closing it would have been easier.
So the fact that you kept yours open matters more than you may realize. Because keeping your heart open in a world that will bruise it is no small thing.
You resisted the temptation to become hardened.
You’ve refused to let disappointment turn you into someone who no longer believes in tenderness.
The older I get, the more I trust that I am brave for choosing not to remove the limbs of who I am to be loved and cared for. I am anchored in myself more than ever these days. I know how to keep listening when something in my spirit says, “ This doesn’t feel right. I don’t need to bleed for this thing to breathe.”
I’m beginning to recognize (and accept) the difference between connection, depletion, and self-deprivation, and the ways they often overlap.
I cannot ignore my own needs and believe I can care for others well.
I will not always be the one who bends and suffers with a smile.
I refuse the old belief that keeping the peace requires me to make myself smaller.
This kind of clarity is hard. Tender, too. It can feel like loss. There’s no avoiding that. Everything begins to shift the moment you start honoring yourself more fully. People will notice when you stop neglecting yourself to keep them warm.
Some won’t like it.
They’ll call it distance.
They’ll call it selfishness.
They’ll say you’ve changed because your growth forces them to confront the ways they have not.
But what they are really seeing is the version of you who has decided not to disappear. Not to let the sap keep running from the wound until there is nothing left, just to be perceived as agreeable and good. The version of you who refuses to erase yourself in order to be chosen is not the problem. That version of you has finally learned how to remain on their own side. And that is a blessing that will reach farther than you can see right now.
It will ask you to tell the truth where you once softened it. It will ask you to stop offering pieces of yourself just to be received. But the reward is a life that finally fits the person you have become. A life where your heart is not constantly negotiating its right to exist. A life where the love you give and the love you receive can finally meet each other out in the open. You did not come this far to keep leaking yourself away. You came this far to root deeper into your own life—to grow from the places that once hurt and still reach toward the light.
In Gratitude & Joy,
Alex
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Journal Questions to Sit With:
Where in your life have you been bending yourself to maintain connection, and what might change if you remained fully on your own side?
How have you mistaken love for loyalty, and how would your life look different if care included you, too?
What is one place in your life right now where honoring yourself—even in a small way—could change the direction of your energy, your relationships, or your peace?
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