Lover Girl.

A friend called me a lover girl recently and I shut right down. The armor just came, the way it does. Lover girl. It sounded like being called easy. Like the thing I am — someone who loves madly, truly, deeply — had been flattened into something careless, something without weight, and I couldn’t sit with that so I did what I always do and I armored up before I let it fully land.

But I am not easy. I never have been.

I am the girl who remembers what you said three conversations ago and asks you about it. The one who notices when your voice changes. I confuse love for lust sometimes, that happens, I won’t pretend otherwise. I read people for a living — it’s the whole job, the listening, the understanding, the meeting someone exactly where they are — and I do it everywhere, in the clinic, at the dinner table, on a first date, in the car on the way home from a first date when I’m replaying every sentence and scanning for the thing I might have missed. I am always tuned to the frequency of whoever is nearest, already adjusting, already translating, and I forget sometimes that I’ve been pointing that attention outward for so long that I stopped turning it toward myself. I show up whole and I show up open and I show up before anyone is ready for me, including me, and that is not a weakness but it is not armor either.

In Chinese medicine, the Heart is the emperor. It houses the Shen — your spirit, your light, the thing behind your eyes that makes you you — and the Heart doesn’t have a wall. It has a gate. A gate it is supposed to open and close with discernment, with care, with the wisdom of knowing who to let in and when to rest. But some of us, the lover girls, the ones who arrived on this earth already radiant and already too willing, we left the gate open. We left it open and called it love and wondered why we kept waking up depleted, our own light flickering in rooms that were never meant to light. Every person you let in becomes either the hand that pulls back the blinds you shut yourself — the ones you closed so long ago you forgot there was a window — or another layer of curtain over light that was trying to get through. And you don’t always know which one they are when they’re standing in front of you smelling like Le Labo Santal and saying all the right things. You find out later. In the body. In the dim.

Joan Didion wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live, but I think the more dangerous thing, the thing nobody warns you about, is that we tell ourselves stories in order to love. We narrate the other person before they’ve had a chance to be real. We assign meaning to the pause before a text, to the way someone says come here, to a hand on the lower back in someone’s instagram story that probably meant nothing but that we screenshot and hold up to the light like evidence of something. And in the narrating, in the story-making, you lose the thing underneath, which is just a person sitting across from you who is also afraid.

The Heart in Chinese medicine is paired with joy — not happiness, joy, and there’s a difference. Happiness is conditional. Joy is constitutional. It lives in you the way blood lives in you, circulating whether or not you’re paying attention. But when the Heart is unsettled, when it’s been opened too many times without being met, when it’s been handed to people who held it like something temporary, joy starts to scatter. It doesn’t leave, it fragments. You feel it in the restlessness, the checking of the phone, the way you can be laughing at a dinner table and still feel like something essential is missing and you can’t name it. That’s scattered Shen. That’s the Heart looking for its own joy in someone else’s hands.

I am thirty, and I say that like it explains something, and maybe it does. Thirty is the year the questions change. Not do they like me but do I like who I become around them. Not will this work but is this the version of myself I want to keep building. The math shifts. The tolerance for performing shrinks. You stop being willing to fold yourself into someone else’s blueprint just because they smelled good and laughed at the right moment and made you feel, briefly, like you existed in the only way that mattered. But you don’t stop wanting it, that’s the thing, the wanting doesn’t get smarter just because you do.

Modern dating is an exercise in dissociation. You build a profile that is you but not you, you select photos that suggest a life you mostly live but also slightly perform, you write something clever in a bio because cleverness is the currency now, not warmth, and you wait for someone to choose you based on a version of yourself you assembled in twenty minutes on a Tuesday night while dipping dates straight into the peanut butter jar. And then you meet them and you are not the profile and they are not the profile and both of you sit across from each other trying to be the person the other person swiped for while also trying to be the person you actually are, and those two things are rarely the same thing, and the gap between them is where most first dates go to die.

And every time, after, I ask myself the same question — who was I in that? Not who were they. Who was I. I ask this clinically now too. When a patient comes in with insomnia, with anxiety that lives behind the sternum, with a pulse that moves like it can’t decide whether to race or hide, I know that pattern. That’s the Heart unsettled. That’s someone whose spirit has been asked to live in too many places at once. And I think, yeah, I know that one from the inside.

Because here’s what nobody tells you about being a lover girl — you become so fluent in reading other people that you lose the ability to read yourself. You know what they need before they say it, you adjust your warmth, your volume, your expectations to match the room they’re offering you, you shrink or expand based on what you think they can hold, and you call this love, you call this emotional intelligence, you call this being good at relationships when really it is a disappearing act so well-rehearsed that you don’t notice you’ve left the building. I have been a mirror my whole life, reflecting back whoever stood in front of me, and mirrors don’t have faces of their own.

That is what happens when the Shen gets buried — when you spend so long adjusting your light to match someone else’s comfort level that you forget the light was yours to begin with. The Heart becomes cluttered, not with love but with the residue of every version of yourself you performed for someone who never asked to see the real one. And clutter in the Heart doesn’t just cloud the mind, it clouds the spirit. You stop being able to feel your own warmth. You mistake their warmth for yours. And when they leave you don’t just lose them, you lose the heat.

I think about the selves I used to be while dating — not the people themselves but who I was in the presence of them. The one who smoked cigarettes and ate dinner at 10pm because the french chef made her feel like she was in Paris. The one who tried so hard to stay awake during movies knowing she wouldn’t last because the writer wanted to show her his favorite films. The one who — fuck me for even saying this — paid for everything because he was figuring his shit out. The one who sat in the undefined for months, convincing herself she was fine with it, when really she was just too afraid to ask the only question that mattered — what is your intention with me. I sound lame, I promise I am a good time. But those women were me and also not me, and the distance between who I was performing and who I was becoming got so wide I could barely stand in my own life without feeling the split.

And yet.

There is a yearning in this and I won’t pretend there isn’t. The yearning of wanting to do the shit that lovers do — lay in bed for an extra ten minutes because it’s ten more minutes of not knowing where you end and I begin, making coffee for two to my favorite song and sitting in silence yet having the deepest conversation, making eyes across the room when it’s time to go home.

But here’s the thing. I already have the love. I have the friends who pick up on the first ring, the long drives to nowhere with the windows down, the this song made me think of you texts at 11pm on a Wednesday. The emergency call. The someone who knows my order, my triggers, my father’s name, the way I go quiet before I cry. I have all of it — the ease, the knowing, the being fully seen.

Except you can’t fuck your friends.

And that’s the yearning, not for love, I have love, but for the whole thing. The person who holds all of it. The best friend you also get to kiss. The ease of being known like that by someone who also wants you like this. In the medicine we say the Heart needs to feel safe to stay open — not safe like nothing bad will happen, safe like the nervous system can exhale, like the chest can soften, like you can fall asleep next to someone without your body keeping watch. And I think that’s what I’m actually looking for in all of this — not fireworks, not the Le Labo Santal guy who says the right things, just someone whose presence lets my chest stay soft.

So I am the lover girl. Still. And I don’t say that the way you reclaim a word at the end of an essay to make it sound triumphant. I say it the way I’d say a diagnosis I’ve finally stopped fighting — not because it’s a sentence but because it’s accurate, and there is relief in accuracy after years of performing something vaguer. I love madly. I love with my whole nervous system. I love in a way that my body registers before my mind catches up, the way a pulse changes before a patient can tell me what’s wrong. I still fall fast. I still feel everything. I still believe, somewhere underneath all the evidence to the contrary, that love is the thing that reorganizes everything else.

But I am learning, slowly, imperfectly, with my whole messy chest, that the Shen doesn’t need someone else to shine. It needs you to stop dimming it on their behalf. We pull the blinds shut for good reasons sometimes — when the sun is too bright for what we’re holding, when we need to sit in the dark with ourselves for a while, when the world is asking us to be visible and we’re not ready yet. That’s discernment — and in the medicine, discernment belongs to the Small Intestine, the Heart’s paired organ, whose entire job is sorting the pure from the impure, deciding what gets absorbed and what gets let go. The Heart protects what’s sacred until it’s safe to let the light back in, and the Small Intestine learns who nourishes you and who just passes through. The problem was never that I closed the blinds. The problem was that I kept waiting for someone else to open them.

And maybe that’s the thing I had to understand before I could hear lover girl and not shut down. That the lover girl was never just looking for a person. She was looking for the life that comes with one.

Because the lover girl doesn’t just love a person. The lover girl loves the trinkets of it all — the someone who is there when you point up at the moon, the echo of your own laugh coming back to you because they remembered the same thing at the same time, the hand that grabs yours to dance when your song comes on and neither of you has to say this is our song because you both already know. The lover girl loves the small things we keep on shelves because they decorate our homes the way the people in our lives embellish our hearts — not because we need them to survive, but because without them the rooms are just rooms.

So perhaps I am a lover girl. And perhaps you can set yourself free from the armor of self-proclaimed independence and be one too.